Visualizing software hierarchy and metrics over releases

Abstract

Analysis and understanding of large software systems requires exploring not only the software structure but also associated software metrics over the development releases. Information visualization helps in this regard greatly through interactive visualizations in comparison to exploring these through the source code or traditional software diagrams like UML diagrams. In this paper, we present our developed visualization tool, called HiMVis, that visualizes software hierarchies and metrics through multi-views visualizations on the same screen. HiMVis visualizes packages and class hierarchies through two space-filling interactive layouts. Further, it shows on demand through multiple views more than fifty software metrics information associated to a particular class or interface over all development releases. We provide a number of interaction and filtering options in the tool to make the exploration of the underlying software system more intuitive. We also conducted a brief user study with 10 participants to determine the usability of the developed tool.