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Software Galaxies: Displaying Coding Activitiesusing a Galaxy Metaphor

Published: 27 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Software visualization uses metaphors to depict software system and software development data that usually has no inherent gestalt. The choice of a fitting metaphor for visual display is researched broadly, but deriving a layout based on similarity is still challenging. We present a novel approach to 3D software visualization called Software Galaxy. Our layout is based on applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation on source code documents. We utilize a metaphor inspired from astronomy for depicting software metrics for single documents and clusters of documents. Our first experiments indicate that a 3D visualization capturing semantic relatedness can be beneficial for standard program comprehension tasks.

References

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Daniel Atzberger, Tim Cech, Merlin de la Haye, Maximilian Söchting, Willy Scheibel, Daniel Limberger, and Jürgen Döllner. 2021. Software Forest: A Visualization of Semantic Similarities in Source Code using a Tree Metaphor. In Proc. 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications – Volume 3(IVAPP ’21). SciTePress, 112–122. https://doi.org/10.5220/0010267601120122
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David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan. 2003. Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3 (2003), 993–1022. https://doi.org/10.5555/944919.944937
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Andrew H. Caudwell. 2010. Gource: Visualizing Software Version Control History. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference Companion on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications Companion(OOPSLA ’10). ACM, 73–74. https://doi.org/10.1145/1869542.1869554
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Tse-Hsun Chen, Stephen W. Thomas, and Ahmed E. Hassan. 2016. A survey on the use of topic models when mining software repositories. Empirical Software Engineering 21, 5 (2016), 1843–1919. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-015-9402-8
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Michael A. A. Cox and Trevor F. Cox. 2008. Multidimensional scaling. In Handbook of Data Visualization. Springer, 315–347.
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Tobias Knöschke. 2020. Design and Implementation of 3D Visualizations for Topic Maps and their Application in Software Analytics. Master’s thesis. Hasso Plattner Institute, Digital Engineering Faculty, University of Potsdam.
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Adrian Kuhn, Peter Loretan, and Oscar Nierstrasz. 2008. Consistent Layout for Thematic Software Maps. In Proc. 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering(WCRE ’08). IEEE, 209–218. https://doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.2008.45
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Michele Lanza. 2001. The Evolution Matrix: Recovering Software Evolution Using Software Visualization Techniques. In Proc. 4th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution(IWPSE ’01). ACM, 37–42. https://doi.org/10.1145/602461.602467
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Lukas Wagner, Willy Scheibel, Daniel Limberger, Matthias Trapp, and Jürgen Döllner. 2020. A Framework for Interactive Exploration of Clusters in Massive Data using 3D Scatter Plots and WebGL. In Proc. 25th International Conference on 3D Web Technology(Web3D ’20). ACM, 31:1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3424616.3424730

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  • (2023)Visualization of Source Code Similarity Using 2.5D Semantic Software MapsComputer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-25477-2_8(162-182)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023

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            cover image ACM Other conferences
            VINCI '21: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction
            September 2021
            139 pages
            ISBN:9781450386470
            DOI:10.1145/3481549
            Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            Published: 27 November 2021

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            Author Tags

            1. Software Visualization
            2. Topic Modeling
            3. Visualization Metaphor

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            Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 193 submissions, 37%

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            • (2023)Visualization of Source Code Similarity Using 2.5D Semantic Software MapsComputer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-25477-2_8(162-182)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023

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