Explora: Infrastructure for Scaling Up Software Visualisation to Corpora

Abstract

Visualisation provides good support for software analysis. It copes with the intangible nature of software by providing concrete representations of it. By reducing the complexity of software, visualisations are especially useful when dealing with large amounts of code. One domain that usually deals with large amounts of source code data is empirical analysis. Although there are many tools for analysis and visualisation, they do not cope well software corpora. In this paper we present Explora, an infrastructure that is specifically targeted at visualising corpora. We report on early results when conducting a sample analysis on Smalltalk and Java corpora.