Software visualization

Software visualization is concerned with the static or animated representation of 2D or 3D information of software systems. The information can thereby describe the structure, the size, the course of history or the dynamic behavior of the system. Typically, this information is used by software metrics for visualization. Visualization is inherently no method of software quality assurance but may be used to manually anomalies (eg cycles) to detect or detected defects with integrating into the visualization. This process is also called visual data mining. The objectives of the visualization software include the understanding of software systems (e.g., structure and morphology) and algorithms (e.g., search algorithms of the animation ) as well as the analysis of software systems for the detection of anomalies ( for example, by representation of classes ( to ) high coupling ).

  • 4.1 Conferences and Workshops
  • 4.2 Research Groups

Classification

The visualization software is a subject area between the software engineering and information visualization. In most works that deal with it, there are fewer new visualization methods or new software analysis method, but on the application of already known forms of representation of certain properties of a software. The counterpart of the software visualization is the so-called visual programming, in which, from a visualization until the software is generated. This approach comes about when learning programs for children or rapid prototyping to bear.

Types of Software Visualization

Visualization of individual classes and components

Tools for software visualization can be used to support a developer directly during software development and maintenance. Goal is the automatic discovery and visualization of quality defects in object-oriented systems or services. As a plug- in development environments such as Eclipse visualize the relationships of a class with other classes in the software system and highlight potential problems. A side effect is the visual navigation through the software system dar.

Visualization of entire ( sub-) systems

Other visualization systems visualize all the software systems or larger groups of class associations to analyze architectures or to check their stop. Examples of such tools are:

  • NDepend
  • Lattix LDM
  • Sotograph
  • Code Crawler
  • SeeSoft
Coupling (computer programming)
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