PerfVis

Abstract

Developers are usually unaware of the impact of code changes to the performance of software systems. Although developers can analyze the performance of a system by executing, for instance, a performance test to compare the performance of two consecutive versions of the system, changing from a programming task to a testing task would disrupt the development flow. In this paper, we propose the use of a city visualization that dynamically provides developers with a pervasive view of the continuous performance of a system. We use an immersive augmented reality device (Microsoft HoloLens) to display our visualization and extend the integrated development environment on a computer screen to use the physical space. We report on technical details of the design and implementation of our visualization tool, and discuss early feedback that we collected of its usability. Our investigation explores a new visual metaphor to support the exploration and analysis of possibly very large and multidimensional performance data. Our initial result indicates that the city metaphor can be adequate to analyze dynamic performance data on a large and non-trivial software system.

Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor

“…Steinbrückner and Lewerentz [61], [62] adopted and extended this idea by visualizing the development history of software systems using elevated city maps. Software cities have been applied in the domains of concurrency visualization [22], software component communication and dependency visualization [11], [23]- [26], software performance visualization [63], [64], business process visualization [65], and test case analysis [66], [67]. Software cities have also been used in virtual reality [13], [14], [64], [68] and have been integrated into computer games such as Minecraft [69].…”