Software visualization in software maintenance, reverse engineering, and re‐engineering: a research survey

TLDR

Software visualization involves static and animated representations of source code, executables, and their attributes such as size, complexity, and dependencies, and is widely applied in maintenance, reverse engineering, and re‑engineering to help engineers comprehend large, complex data sets. The study aims to assess how researchers in software maintenance, reverse engineering, and re‑engineering engage with software visualization, what aspects they visualize, and how they view animation and graph layout techniques. A survey of 82 researchers was conducted to gather information on their involvement, visualization practices, animation usage, perceived usefulness, employed graph layouts, identified deficiencies, and suggested future research directions. Survey results indicate the current role of software visualization in these domains and highlight areas for future research, revealing researchers’ perspectives on animation, layout algorithms, and research priorities. © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract Software visualization is concerned with the static visualization as well as the animation of software artifacts, such as source code, executable programs, and the data they manipulate, and their attributes, such as size, complexity, or dependencies. Software visualization techniques are widely used in the areas of software maintenance, reverse engineering, and re‐engineering, where typically large amounts of complex data need to be understood and a high degree of interaction between software engineers and automatic analyses is required. This paper reports the results of a survey on the perspectives of 82 researchers in software maintenance, reverse engineering, and re‐engineering on software visualization. It describes to which degree the researchers are involved in software visualization themselves, what is visualized and how, whether animation is frequently used, whether the researchers believe animation is useful at all, which automatic graph layouts are used if at all, whether the layout algorithms have deficiencies, and—last but not least—where the medium‐term and long‐term research in software visualization should be directed. The results of this survey help to ascertain the current role of software visualization in software engineering from the perspective of researchers in these domains and give hints on future research avenues. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.