Software visualization: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:05, 6 November 2007

Revision as of 05:20, 14 January 2008

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'''Software visualization''' (Diehl, 2002; Knight, 2002) is concerned with the static or animated 2-D or 3-D (Marcus et al., 2003) visual representation of information about software systems based on their structure (Staples & Bieman, 1999), size (Lanza, 2004), history (Girba et al, 2005, Lopez et al., 2004; Van Rysselberghe et al., 2004), or behavior (Kuhn et al., 2006, Stasko et al., 1997). Typically, the information used for [[visualization]] is [[software metric]] data from measurement activities. Visualization is inherently not a method for [[software quality assurance]] but can be used to manually discover anomalies similar to the process of [[visual data mining]] (Keim, 2002; Soukup, 2002).

The objectives of software visualizations are to support the [[program understanding|understanding]] of software systems (i.e., its structure) and algorithms (e.g., by animating the behavior of sorting algorithms) as well as the analysis of software systems and their anomalies (e.g., by showing classes with height [[coupling (computer science)|coupling]]).