Software Visualization John C' Anderson ECS289H Winter '05

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Software VisualizationJohn C. AndersonECS289H
Winter '05

• A Discussion Of
• Software Visualization in the Large
• Bell and Eick
• Seesoft A Tool For Visualizing Line Oriented
  Software Statistics
• Eick, Steffen, and Sumner, Jr.

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What to Visualize about Software?

• Common aspects to visualize include
• The structure of the software.
• The code that comprises the software.
• The runtime behavior of the software.
• We can also visualize related information
• Version control differences.
• Quality control statistics.

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Tasks in Software Visualization

• There are many tasks in software visualization
• Provide overview of software system.
• Insight on how parts of a system interact.
• Look at files and the properties of the code.
• Find out when Bob modified files!
• In general, we want to understand the software.

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Visual Representations

• The structure of software lends itself to certain
  types of visualization
• Line (Seesoft)
• Pixel
• File summary
• Hierarchical

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Line Representation (Seesoft)

• A line in the visualization corresponds to a line
  of source code.
• The style of the line (color, length, stipple,
  etc.) can denote properties about a line of code.
• Easy to display certain aspects of code
• Commented vs. non-commented regions.
• Indention level.
• Last modified date.

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Pixel Representation

• Lines of source code correspond to a small number
  of color-coded pixels.
• The size of a pixel representation corresponds to
  the file size.
• Patterns are visible even though individual lines
  can be hard to distinguish.

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File Summary Representation

• Represent a file as a rectangle.
• The style of the rectangle, and its label,
  describe the file.
• TreeMap algorithm can be used to compactly draw
  many different files.

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Hierarchical Representation

• Visually convey the hierarchical nature of some
  software packages
• Subdirectories
• Subsystems/Components
• It is possible to tie a hierarchical
  representation to a line, pixel, or file summary
  representation to allow for more navigation.

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Examples

• In order to understand these representations, we
  should look at a few examples

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Line Representation (Seesoft)Text File Summary
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Line Representation (Seesoft)Software Modularity

• Logging code within org.apache.tomcat
• Red shows lines of code that perform logging.
• Not centralized difficult to maintain/understand.
  
• Better would be a few files of mostly red.

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Line RepresentationDifferences
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Line Representationvs.Pixel Representation
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File Summary Representation
a) Boxes represent files, chart represents line
age. Red is newer, blue older.
b) Bug fixes vs. new feature development. Red is
bug, blue is new.
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Hierarchical RepresentationDifferences