Organisational trails through software systems

Abstract

The use of three dimensional software visualisation techniques has the power to transform the way that tacit knowledge gathering and retrieval takes place during many software maintenance activities. The focus of this work is the understanding and management of software from various perspectives and therefore it is the visualisation of these software artefacts that is of greatest interest. This work moves towards providing a generic visualisation that is applicable to the management of many software systems within the bounds of the organisation, with the ability to view various artefacts over time (and thus their evolution) and also to incorporate lower level visualisations in three dimensions.