Visually localizing design problems with disharmony maps

Wettel, Richard; Lanza, Michele

doi:10.1145/1409720.1409745

Cited by 56 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As a consequence of this limitation, static analysis does not present sufficient information to study the interactions of source modules [26][27] [34]. Recording dynamic information of a program can provide us with sufficient knowledge about message exchanges and modular interactions during the program execution period [40][41] [19].…”

Section: Architecture Decomposition Partitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Design Analysis with Dynamic System Run-Time Architecture Decomposition

Wu¹,

Vinayak²

2017

IJSEA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Architecture Decomposition Partitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Design Analysis with Dynamic System Run-Time Architecture Decomposition

Wu¹,

Vinayak²

2017

IJSEA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Based on these tendency, Wettel and Lanza provide a visual way to analyze software quality metrics for the localization of software design disharmonies [12]. We want provide a visualization of automatically selected software metrics according to stakeholders of a software project.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fostering software quality assessment

Brandtner¹

2013

2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Software quality assessment shall monitor and guide the evolution of a system based on quality measurements. This continuous process should ideally involve multiple stakeholders and provide adequate information for each of them to use. We want to support an effective selection of quality measurements based on the type of software and individual information needs of the involved stakeholders. We propose an approach that brings together quality measurements and individual information needs for a contextsensitive tailoring of information related to a software quality assessment. We address the following research question: How can we better support different stakeholders in the quality assessment of a software system? For that we will devise theories, models, and prototypes to capture their individual information needs, tailor information from software repositories to these needs, and enable a contextual analysis of the quality aspects. Such a context-sensitive tailoring will provide a effective and individual view on the latest development trends in a project. Abstract-Software quality assessment shall monitor and guide the evolution of a system based on quality measurements. This continuous process should ideally involve multiple stakeholders and provide adequate information for each of them to use. We want to support an effective selection of quality measurements based on the type of software and individual information needs of the involved stakeholders. We propose an approach that brings together quality measurements and individual information needs for a context-sensitive tailoring of information related to a software quality assessment. We address the following research question: How can we better support different stakeholders in the quality assessment of a software system? For that we will devise theories, models, and prototypes to capture their individual information needs, tailor information from software repositories to these needs, and enable a contextual analysis of the quality aspects. Such a context-sensitive tailoring will provide a effective and individual view on the latest development trends in a project. We outline the milestones as well as evaluation approaches in this paper.

show abstract

“…The application of the city metaphor to design quality assessment [WL08d]. To enable our approach to support the analysis of software design, we devised a visualization technique called disharmony map, which allows one to get an overview of the design problems, i.e., detected violations of design guidelines.…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software systems as cities

Wettel

Lanza

Robbes

2011

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Self Cite

149

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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 ...

show abstract

Visually localizing design problems with disharmony maps

Cited by 56 publications

References 29 publications

Software Design Analysis with Dynamic System Run-Time Architecture Decomposition

Software Design Analysis with Dynamic System Run-Time Architecture Decomposition

Fostering software quality assessment

Software systems as cities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About