Software Architecture Visualization: An Evaluation Framework and Its Application

Gallagher, Keith; Hatch, Andrew; Munro, Malcolm

doi:10.1109/tse.2007.70757

Cited by 35 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…In fact, survey papers on software visualization exist, such as REV [18], software architecture visualization [35], and visualization of the static aspects of source code [15]. Our work complements this literature by providing with the users a VA framework for RE to compare different methods and by developing the tool enhancements in a principled way.…”

Section: Requirements Engineering Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 90%

Visual analytics for software requirements engineering

Reddivari

2013

2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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For many software projects, keeping requirements on track needs an effective and efficient path from data to decision. Visual analytics creates such a path that enables the human to extract insights by interacting with the relevant information. While various requirements visualization techniques exist, few have produced end-to-end values to practitioners. In this dissertation, we advance the literature on visual requirements analytics by characterizing its key components and relationships in a framework. We follow the goal-question-metric paradigm to define the framework by teasing out five conceptual goals (user, data, model, visualization, and knowledge), their specific operationalizations, and their interconnections. The framework allows us to not only assess existing approaches, but also create tool enhancements in a principled manner.We evaluate our enhanced tool supports both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, we evaluate our tool supports qualitatively through a case study where massive, heterogeneous, and dynamic requirements are processed, visualized, and analyzed. Working together with practitioners on a contemporary software project within its real-life context leads to the main ending that visual analytics can help tackle both open-ended visual exploration tasks and well-structured visual exploitation tasks in requirements engineering. In addition, the study helps the practitioners to reach actionable decisions in a wide range of areas relating to their project, ranging from theme and outlier identification, over requirements tracing, to risk assessment. Overall our work illuminates how the data-to-decision analytical capabilities could be improved by the increased interactivity of requirements visualization.Although many new visual analytics tools, techniques and methods are being developed, still there is a lack of understanding of how to evaluate the performance of such tools. We conducted an experiment to assess the performance (time and correctness) of our visual analytics tool support in solving requirements engineering tasks. Our study provides initial evidence and insights for visual analytics in requirements engineering and sheds light on many challenging open questions.

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Section: Requirements Engineering Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 90%

Visual analytics for software requirements engineering

Reddivari

2013

2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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“…In order to allow visual comparison of the different tools, we make use of Kiviat diagrams [ELSW06] (also known as starplots [GHM08]). Each angular spoke represents a requirement, which we separated in two sections.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We take various elements from the work of Moody [Moo09] on Visual Notations and the work of Gallagher et al [GHM08] on Software Architecture Visualization, supporting ourselves with some other authors when necessary.…”

Section: Requirements For An Unfiltered View Of Large Ea Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is desirable that the user could make use of common user navigation techniques such as panning, zooming, bookmarking, and rotating in both 2D and 3D environments [GHM08], and when necessary, modify the arrangement of certain elements easily. Also, animation of layouts and the use of projections into different coordinate systems can be helpful in the exploration of the model.…”

Section: Navigate and Interact (Ni)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluating the capabilities of Enterprise Architecture modeling tools for Visual Analysis.

Naranjo¹,

Sánchez²,

Villalobos³

2015

JOT

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In model analysis activities, it is critical to make early statements and diagnosis from a high level of abstraction. Currently, these tasks are difficult to perform, and they require both the involvement of experts and the elaboration of specialized artifacts. Furthermore, the complexity of the tasks increases as models become bigger and more detailed. In other contexts, it has been noticed that total / holistic / unfiltered visualizations may give insight about the models, providing analysts a starting point for exploration and general pattern discovery.In this paper, we evaluate the support that six different Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling tools offer to EA analysis activities, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of six visualization frameworks, in order to extend the analysis of enterprise models by Visual Analysis. The evaluation is based on a set of 14 requirements which are either visualization-related or specific to EA analysis, and its results were harvested from a) observed characteristics of the diagrams of these tools, and b) visualizations from an enterprise model, generated with the aforementioned visualization frameworks. These results point to several actionable subjects and research opportunities for the field of EA Modeling and Analysis.

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“…Visualizing the architecture of software [93] is one of the most important topics in the visualization of software field [86], [94], [95], [96]. Object-oriented software is generally structured hierarchically, with packages containing subpackages, recursively, and with classes structured by methods and attributes.…”

Section: Architecture 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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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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Software Architecture Visualization: An Evaluation Framework and Its Application

Cited by 35 publications

References 19 publications

Visual analytics for software requirements engineering

Visual analytics for software requirements engineering

Evaluating the capabilities of Enterprise Architecture modeling tools for Visual Analysis.

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

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