Comprehending Software Architecture using a Single-View Visualization
Software is among the most complex human artifacts, and visualization is widely acknowledged as important to understanding software. In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding a software system's architecture through visualization. Whereas traditional visualizations use multiple stakeholder-specific views to present different kinds of task-specific information, we propose an additional visualization technique that unifies the presentation of various kinds of architecture-level information, thereby allowing a variety of stakeholders to quickly see and communicate current development, quality, and costs of a software system. For future empirical evaluation of multi-aspect, single-view architectural visualizations, we have implemented our idea in an existing visualization tool, Vizz3D. Our implementation includes techniques, such as the use of a city metaphor, that reduce visual complexity in order to support single-view visualizations of large-scale programs.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 912935
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-CONF-227293; TRN: US200802%%468
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at: 12th IEEE Int. Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, Auckland, New Zealand, Jul 11 - Jul 14, 2007
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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