Comprehending Software Architecture Using a Single-View Visualization.

Panas, T. ; Epperly, T. G. W. ; Quinlan, D. J. ; Saebjoernse, A. ; Vuduc, R. W.

Technical Information Center Oak Ridge Tennessee

关键词: Computer software;    Computer architecture;    Visualization;    Computer graphics;   

RP-ID  :  DE2007912935

学科分类：工程和技术（综合）

美国|英语

来源: National Technical Reports Library

【 摘 要 】

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 systems architecture through visualization. Whereas traditional visualizations use multiple stakeholder-specific views to present different kinds of taskspecific 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.