Software visualization with audio supported cognitive glyphs

Boccuzzo, Sandro; Gall, Harald C.

doi:10.1109/icsm.2008.4658085

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Old and collapsed buildings indicate source code that needs to be refactored, which is a realistic and intuitive way to indicate design problems. A second technique, the "CocoViz" visualization proposed by Boccuzzo and Gall [176], [177], focuses on visualizing whether a system is well-designed or not. Their main idea is that misshaped objects symbolize potentially badly designed software elements.…”

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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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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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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“…A fundamental component for an appropriate visualization support therefore is an adequate highlighting of basic structure units. After further investigating on fundamental components for program understanding and suggestions for facilitating software comprehension as [11,10], we suggested extending interaction in software visualizations with an audio visual approach [5]. By using audio we solved the previous mentioned shortcomings and we were able to improve the navigation and program comprehension capabilities of our CocoViz approach in general.…”

Section: Support Software Visualization With Audiomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our primer results with audio supported visualizations [5] focused more on an investigative support of a visualization. The results showed how we were able to get additional information on one particular software entity without losing focus on the current visualization state and task.…”

Section: Ambient Audio Conceptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beyond the visual presentation we started to think about ways to support and lead observers to relevant aspects. In [5] we described ways to support visual representations of software entities with aural representations. With this approach we were able to further investigate visual representations of a particular software entity and its properties without leaving the focus from the actual visualization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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CocoViz with ambient audio software exploration

Boccuzzo

Gall

2009

2009 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Engineering

Self Cite

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For ages we used our ears side by side with our ophthalmic stimuli to gather additional information, leading and supporting us in our visualization. Nowadays numerous software visualization techniques exist that aim to facilitate program comprehension. In this paper we discuss how we can support such software comprehension visualization with environmental audio and lead users to identify relevant aspects. We use cognitive visualization techniques and audio concepts described in our previous work to create an ambient audio software exploration (AASE) out of program entities (packages, classes ...) and their mapped properties. The concepts where implemented in a extended version of our tool called CocoViz. Our first results with the prototype shows that with this combination of visual and aural means we can provide additional information to lead users during program comprehension tasks.

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“…Later, Boccuzzo and Gall took an interesting take on reverse engineering, by enriching visualization with audio support [BG08].…”

Section: The Work Of Alam and Dugerdil Represents Their Vision Of Thementioning

confidence: 99%

Software systems as cities

Wettel

Lanza

Robbes

2011

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

149

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Software understanding takes up a large share of the total cost of a software system. The high costs attributed to software understanding activities are caused by the size and complexity of software systems, by the continuous evolution that these systems are subject to, and by the lack of physical presence which makes software intangible. Reverse engineering helps practitioners deal with the intrinsic complexity of software, by providing a broad range of patterns and techniques. One of these techniques is software visualization, which makes software more tangible, by providing visible representations of software systems.Interpreting a visualization is by no means trivial and requires knowledge about the visual language of the visualization. One means to ease the learning of a new visualization's language are metaphors, which allow the interpretation of new data representations by analogy. Possibly one of the most popular metaphors for software visualization is the city metaphor, which has been explored in the past by a number of researchers. However, in spite of the efforts, the value of this metaphor for reverse engineering has never been taken beyond anecdotical evidence.In this dissertation, we demonstrate the value of the city metaphor for reverse engineering along two directions. On the one hand, we show that the metaphor is versatile enough to allow the representation of different facets of software. On the other hand, we show that the city metaphor enables the creation of software visualizations which efficiently and effectively support reverse engineering activities.Our interpretation of the city metaphor at its core depicts the system as a city, the packages as districts, and the classes as buildings. The resulting "code city" visualization provides a structural overview of the software system, enriched with contextual data. To be able to perform analyses of real systems using our approach, we implemented a tool called CodeCity.We demonstrate the versatility of the metaphor, by using it in three different analysis contexts, i.e., program comprehension, software evolution analysis, and software design quality assessment. For each of the contexts, we describe the visualization techniques we employ to encode the contextual data in the visualization and we illustrate the application by means of case studies. The insights gained in the three analysis contexts are complementary to each other, leading to an increasingly more complete "big picture" of the systems.We then demonstrate how the visualizations built on top of our city metaphor effectively and efficiently support reverse engineering activities, by means of an extensive controlled experiment. The design of our experiment is based on a list of desiderata that we extracted from our survey of the current body of research. We conducted the experiment over a period of six months, in four sites located in three countries, with a heterogeneous sample of subjects composed of fair shares of both academics and industry practitioners. The main result of ...

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Software visualization with audio supported cognitive glyphs

Cited by 17 publications

References 29 publications

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

CocoViz with ambient audio software exploration

Software systems as cities

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