Communicating Software Architecture using a Unified Single-View Visualization

Abstract-Software is usually complex and always intangible. In practice, the development and maintenance processes are timeconsuming activities mainly because software complexity is difficult to manage. Graphical visualization of software has the potential to result in a better and faster understanding of its design and functionality, thus saving time and providing valuable information to improve its quality. However, visualizing software is not an easy task because of the huge amount of information comprised in the software. Furthermore, the information content increases significantly once the time dimension to visualize the evolution of the software is taken into account. Human perception of information and cognitive factors must thus be taken into account to improve the understandability of the visualization. In this paper, we survey visualization techniques, both 2D-and 3D-based, representing the static aspects of the software and its evolution. We categorize these techniques according to the issues they focus on, in order to help compare them and identify the most relevant techniques and tools for a given problem.

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“…Panas et al [34] use a Cities metaphor to represent software. We name it "The Unified Single-View City."…”

Section: P 2)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their visualization thus displays a lot of information (architecture, relationships, metrics) through a unique unified single-view visualization [34] (Fig. 15).…”

Section: Metric-centered Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

Caserta

Zendra

2011

IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics

113

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“…Usually, the software city geometry is laid out over a 2D plane [27]. Some works divide the 2D plane on many pieces and add a degree of elevation on each of them to express software metrics [28] or project metrics [29].…”

Section: A the City Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

3D Hierarchical Edge bundles to visualize relations in a software city metaphor

Caserta¹,

Zendra²,

Bodenes³

2011

2011 6th International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT)

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Software systems are often very complex because of their huge size and the tremendous number of interactions between their components. However, understanding relations between software elements is crucial to optimize the development and the maintenance process. A good way to ease this understanding of software relations is to use advanced visualization techniques to graphically see interactions between elements. Nevertheless representing those software relations is not an easy task and often leads to hard to understand clutter. We believe that combining both edge clustering techniques and real-world metaphors can help to address this issue, producing easierto-read visualizations that ease the cognitive process and thus significantly help understanding the underlying software. In this paper, we explain how we adapted the existing 2D Hierarchical Edge bundles technique to represent relations in a 3D space on top of city metaphors.

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“…To conduct our experiment of visual signature comparisondescribed in Section 4 -we have chosen metrics that allow us to visualize a binary's signature in three dimensional space using a landscape metaphor. The right choice of metaphor is essential to improve the usability and understandability of a visualization [Panas et al 2007]. Metaphors found in nature are intuitive and provide a graphic design that the user already understands.…”

Section: Signature Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signature visualization of software binaries

Panas¹

2008

Proceedings of the 4th ACM Symposium on Software Visualization

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In this paper we present work on the visualization of software binaries. In particular, we utilize ROSE, an open source compiler infrastructure, to pre-process software binaries, and we apply a landscape metaphor to visualize the signature of each binary (malware). We define the signature of a binary as a metric-based layout of the functions contained in the binary. In our initial experiment, we visualize the signatures of a series of computer worms that all originate from the same line. These visualizations are useful for a number of reasons. First, the images reveal how the archetype has evolved over a series of versions of one worm. Second, one can see the distinct changes between versions. This allows the viewer to form conclusions about the development cycle of a particular worm.

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Communicating Software Architecture using a Unified Single-View Visualization

Cited by 35 publications

References 24 publications

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

3D Hierarchical Edge bundles to visualize relations in a software city metaphor

Signature visualization of software binaries

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