Towards actionable visualization for software developers

Abstract

Abundant studies have shown that visualization is advantageous for software developers, yet adopting visualization during software development is not a common practice due to the large effort involved in finding an appropriate visualization. Developers require support to facilitate that task. Among 368 papers in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT venues, we identify 86 design study papers about the application of visualization to relieve concerns in software development. We extract from these studies the task, need, audience, data source, representation, medium, and tool, and we characterize them according to the subject, process, and problem domain. On the one hand, we support software developers to put visualization in action by mapping existing visualization techniques to particular needs from different perspectives. On the other hand, we highlight the problem domains that are overlooked in the field and need more support.

PerfVis

“…Technique: City Visualization and Scatter plot. In a previous study [12], we observed that most visualizations to support developers in monitoring performance used pixel-based techniques. These visualizations usually attempt to provide an overview of a significant amount of data to promote the detection of visual patterns that may signal anomalies in the performance of software systems.…”

“…PerfVis is a tool to visualize software performance through immersive augmented reality. We characterize the context of PerfVis using a taxonomy proposed by Maletic et al [6] and Merino et al [12].…”

On software modernisation due to library obsolescence

“…The beneits of using suitable visual metaphors both for assisting with software exploration and for reducing the cognitive load is widely accepted [1,8]. Several visual metaphors have been proposed for representing static aspects of software (cf.…”

“…Visualisation Techniques. Software visualisation techniques are widely used in program comprehension; see for instance the recent survey in [8] about existing software visualisation approaches. This survey highlights the number of visualisation tools for supporting developers' needs on dependency management.…”

“…For instance, visualisation paradigms can help developers to understand better the architecture of their systems and perform impact analysis. Software visualisation is an active research area, but with rather limited adoption in software development [8,12]. Also, code-based and pattern-based transformation approaches can assist with automating code refactoring [2].…”