Towards Actionable Visualisation in Software Development

Abstract

Although abundant studies have shown how visualisation can help software developers to perform their daily tasks, visualisation is still not a common practice since developers have little support for adopting a proper visualisation for their needs. In this paper we review the 346 papers published in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT venues and identify 65 design study papers that describe how visualisation is used to alleviate various difficulties in software development. We classify these studies into several problem domains that we collected from the research on software development community, and highlight the characteristics of each study. On the one hand, we support software developers to put visualisation in action by mapping existing techniques to particular needs in various problem domains. On the other hand, we help researchers in the field by exposing domains with little visualisation support. We found a disconnect between the problem domains on which visualisation have focused and the domains that get the most attention from practitioners.