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Visualizing software hierarchy and metrics over releases

Published: 29 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Analysis and understanding of large software systems requires exploring not only the software structure but also associated software metrics over the development releases. Information visualization helps in this regard greatly through interactive visualizations in comparison to exploring these through the source code or traditional software diagrams like UML diagrams. In this paper, we present our developed visualization tool, called HiMVis, that visualizes software hierarchies and metrics through multi-views visualizations on the same screen. HiMVis visualizes packages and class hierarchies through two space-filling interactive layouts. Further, it shows on demand through multiple views more than fifty software metrics information associated to a particular class or interface over all development releases. We provide a number of interaction and filtering options in the tool to make the exploration of the underlying software system more intuitive. We also conducted a brief user study with 10 participants to determine the usability of the developed tool.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AVI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
May 2018
430 pages
ISBN:9781450356169
DOI:10.1145/3206505
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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 29 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. information visualization
  2. software architecture
  3. software metrics

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AVI '18
AVI '18: 2018 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
May 29 - June 1, 2018
Grosseto, Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy

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AVI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 77 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 128 of 490 submissions, 26%

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