Towards suitable automatic software visualization

1. Software
Visualization
Leonel Merino
merino @ inf.unibe.ch
Software Composition Group
University of Bern

2. what?
Communication
providing a common view for presentation or
discussion in a tea
Discoverability
finding phenomena through visual patterns
Comprehension
navigating views of aspect of software

3. why?
3
Layout
Shape
Granularity
Edges
Color Size
TransparencyNormalization
Technique
Aggregation
Chance of choosing the best
visualization?
e.g 100 techniques x 7
mappings (avg.)
2 in a million

4. how? automatic visualization
Systematic Literature Review
classify tools & techniques
classify user needs
Data
data types
relationships
statistics
…
User (needs)
assessing a refactoring
understanding a legacy
system
…
Context
user behavior
quality metrics
…

5. how? pattern recognition
PolyCell
Explora
Force-directed
layout clustering
Hasse
diagram

6. Towards suitable automatic software
visualization
Leonel Merino Jan 2016 merino@inf.unibe.ch
Communication
Comprehension
Discoverability
what? why? chance of
choosing the best
visualization?
2 in a million
how?
Automatic Visualization Pattern Recognition
Although many visualizations seem useful for general questions, choosing
a suitable technique depends not only on the data structure but also on
the user needs, because most developer tasks have a specific context.
Why software visualization is rarely used by developers in a daily basis?
Data | User | Context