Software visualization: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:44, 16 January 2008

Revision as of 04:15, 19 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 understandingcomprehension|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]]).

== Types of software visualization ==

=== Visualization of a single component ===

Tool for software visualization might be used to visualize source code and [[quality defect]]s during software development and maintenance activities. Their target is the automatic discovery and visualization of quality defects in object-oriented software systems and services. Designed as a plugin for an [[Integrated development environment|IDE]] (e.g., eclipse[[Eclipse]]) they visualized the direct relationship of a class and its methods with other classes in the software system and mark potential [[quality defect]]sdefects to warn the developer. A further benefit is the support for visual navigation through the software system.

[[Image:CodeSonar_ShowsDefect.png|Code Sonar]]

=== Visualization of whole (sub-)systems ===

Other more powerful tools are used to visualize a whole system or subsystem in order to visualizeexplore the architecture or to apply [[visual data mining]] or [[visual analytics]] techniques for defect discovery. Such tools are, for example:

* CodeCrawler

* X-Ray

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==External links==

=== Tools ===

* CodeCrawler ([http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Papers/Lanz03eVisSoft.pdf "CodeCrawler - A Lightweight Software Visualization Tool"])

* X-Ray ([http://atelier.inf.unisi.ch/~malnatij/xray.html"X-Ray - A Software Visualization Plug-in for Eclipse"])

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* Structure101 ([http://www.headwaysoftware.com/products/structure101/highlights.php "Software Visualization for Understanding And Analyzing the Complexity of Your Software Architecture"])

=== Conferences and Workshops ===

== Research Groups ==

* [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/softviz/ Software Visualization at GVU]

* [http://www.cs.hut.fi/Research/SVG/ Software Visualization Group] at the Helsinki University of Technology

* [http://www.elvis.ac.nz/brain?SoftwareVisualisation Software Visualization at Victoria University of Wellington]

* [http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/ Software Composition Group]

== Conferences and Workshops ==

* [http://www.softvis.org SoftVis] is the second meeting in a planned series of biennial conferences.

* [http://www.algoanim.net/pvw2006/ The Program Visualization Workshops] aim to bring together researchers who design and construct program, algorithm, or data structure visualizations or animations as well as educators who use or evaluate visualization or animations in their teaching.