Visual Realism for the Visualization of Software Metrics

Software evolution visualization is a promising technique for assessing the software development process. We study how complex correlations of software evolution attributes can be made using multivariate visualization techniques. We use a combination of color and textures to depict up to four artifact attributes at the same time in one view using the same spatial layout. Next, we describe an interactive navigation method of the attribute space that can extend the correlation capabilities to four or more attributes. A second issue we address is how to use clustering to reduce the complexity of evolution visualizations. We propose two new methods, isometric and isorelevance, to generate relevant abstraction levels in a hierarchical clustering of software evolution artifacts. The isometric method generates partitions with similar size elements. The isorelevance method generates partitions with elements of similar relevance. We propose a novel widget, the cluster map, which visualizes all partitions in a clustering and supports users when making size/relevance compromises when choosing a partition. We illustrate the applicability of the proposed techniques with two usage scenarios on the evolution of two real-life industry size projects.

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“…Our approach resembles the one proposed in [Holten et al 2005]. However, there are important differences.…”

Section: Texture Synthesis For Attribute Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Holten et al use procedural textures and color to depict the distribution of two attributes over the structure of a software system [Holten et al 2005]. The texture-color combination principles advocated by the abovementioned methods could be adapted also for software evolution visualization.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiscale and multivariate visualizations of software evolution

Voinea

Telea

2006

Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization - SoftVis '06

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“…21) [39]. This choice is based on the fact that human visual perception enables rapid processing of texture [170].…”

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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“…Related methods: To our knowledge, there is only one other software visualization that uses textures to show numeric metric values [6]. Our method differs from this as follows.…”

Section: Understandabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing metrics on areas of interest in software architecture diagrams

Byelas¹,

Telea²

2009

2009 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium

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We present a new method for the combined visualization of software architecture diagrams, such as UML class diagrams or component diagrams, and software metrics defined on groups of diagram elements. Our method extends an existing rendering technique for the so-called areas of interest in system architecture diagrams to visualize several metrics, possibly having missing values, defined on overlapping areas of interest. For this, we use a solution that combines texturing, blending, and smooth scattered-data point interpolation. Our new method simplifies the task of visually correlating the distribution and outlier values of a multivariate metric dataset with a system's structure. We demonstrate the application of our method on component and class diagrams extracted from real-world systems.

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Visual Realism for the Visualization of Software Metrics

Cited by 24 publications

References 12 publications

Multiscale and multivariate visualizations of software evolution

Multiscale and multivariate visualizations of software evolution

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

Visualizing metrics on areas of interest in software architecture diagrams

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