Software visualization in the large

TLDR

The invisible nature of software hides system complexity, particularly for large team‑oriented projects. The authors develop four innovative visual representations of code to address this hidden complexity. They describe the four visual code representations, their interaction techniques, and illustrate them through five case studies covering software history, static characteristics, and execution behavior, supported by a software library. The authors compare and contrast their techniques with related work, highlighting differences in visualization approaches.

Abstract

The invisible nature of software hides system complexity, particularly for large team-oriented projects. The authors have evolved four innovative visual representations of code to help solve this problem: line representation; pixel representation; file summary representation; and hierarchical representation. We first describe these four visual code representations and then discuss the interaction techniques for manipulating them. We illustrate our software visualization techniques through five case studies. The first three focus on software history and static software characteristics; the last two discuss execution behavior. The software library and its implementation are then described. Finally, we briefly review some related work and compare and contrast our different techniques for visualizing software.