Slicing-Based Techniques for Visualizing Large Metamodels

Blouin, Arnaud; Moha, Naouel; Baudry, Benoît; Sahraoui, Houari

doi:10.1109/vissoft.2014.14

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This paper extends our work published at VISSOFT 2014 (New Ideas or Emerging Results Track) [21] with an empirical study, an exhaustive study of the related work, and more details explaining the proposed interactive visualization features.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Assessing the use of slicing-based visualizing techniques on the understanding of large metamodels

Blouin¹,

Moha²,

Baudry³

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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Context. Metamodels are cornerstones of various metamodeling activities. Such activities consist of, for instance, transforming models into code or comparing metamodels. These activities thus require a good understanding of a metamodel and/or its parts. Current metamodel editing tools are based on standard interactive visualization features, such as physical zooms. Objective. However, as soon as metamodels become large, navigating through large metamodels becomes a tedious task that hinders their understanding. So, a real need to support metamodel comprehension appears. Method. In this work we promote the use of model slicing techniques to build interactive visualization tools for metamodels. Model slicing is a model comprehension technique inspired by program slicing. We show how the use of Kompren, a domain-specific language for defining model slicers, can ease the development of such interactive visualization features. Results. We specifically make four main contributions. First, the proposed interactive visualization techniques permit users to focus on metamodel elements of interest, which aims at improving the understandability. Second, these proposed techniques are developed based on model slicing, a model comprehension technique that involves extracting a subset of model elements of interest. Third, we develop a metamodel visualizer, called Explen, embedding the proposed interactive visualization techniques. Fourth, we conducted experiments. showing that Explen significantly outperforms EcoreTools, in terms of time, correctness, and navigation effort, on metamodeling tasks. Conclusion. The results of the experiments, in favor of Explen, show that improving metamodel understanding can be done using slicing-based interactive navigation features.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 63%

Assessing the use of slicing-based visualizing techniques on the understanding of large metamodels

Blouin¹,

Moha²,

Baudry³

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Orion-Planning [57] includes visualization for modularization and consistency of software projects. Explen [58] supports the visualization of large metamodels. iTraceVis [59] has shown evidence of being effective to investigate how developers read code through the visualization of their eye gazes.…”

Section: ) Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

VISON: An Ontology-Based Approach for Software Visualization Tool Discoverability

Merino

Kozlova

Nierstrasz

et al. 2019

2019 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)

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Although many tools have been presented in the research literature of software visualization, there is little evidence of their adoption. To choose a suitable visualization tool, practitioners need to analyze various characteristics of tools such as their supported software concerns and level of maturity. Indeed, some tools can be prototypes for which the lifespan is expected to be short, whereas others can be fairly mature products that are maintained for a longer time. Although such characteristics are often described in papers, we conjecture that practitioners willing to adopt software visualizations require additional support to discover suitable visualization tools. In this paper, we elaborate on our efforts to provide such support. To this end, we systematically analyzed research papers in the literature of software visualization and curated a catalog of 70 available tools that employ various visualization techniques to support the analysis of multiple software concerns. We further encapsulate these characteristics in an ontology. VISON, our software visualization ontology, captures these semantics as concepts and relationships. We report on early results of usage scenarios that demonstrate how the ontology can support (i) developers to find suitable tools for particular development concerns, and (ii) researchers who propose new software visualization tools to identify a baseline tool for a controlled experiment. arXiv:1908.04090v1 [cs.SE] 12 Aug 2019Step 2. Consider reusing existing ontologies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ontology of software visualizations.Step 3. Enumerate important terms in the ontology. We include the characteristics of software visualization and their evaluations, as well as the classifications presented in previous studies [6], [7].

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Slicing-Based Techniques for Visualizing Large Metamodels

Cited by 2 publications

References 24 publications

Assessing the use of slicing-based visualizing techniques on the understanding of large metamodels

Assessing the use of slicing-based visualizing techniques on the understanding of large metamodels

VISON: An Ontology-Based Approach for Software Visualization Tool Discoverability

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