Scalable Collaborative Software Visualization as a Service: Short Industry and Experience Paper

Software visualizations are used by software developers, for instance, for program comprehension. In this context, a less researched aspect is the collaborative use of online visual-ization services. This paper presents the conceptual design and a prototype implementation of our approach for a collaborative software visualization service for program comprehension. The central idea is an online available software-as-a-service application that analyzes, persists, and visualizes software applications which users intend to explore and comprehend via software visualization. The resulting implementation is a redevelopment of our live trace visualization tool Explor Viz. In comparison to other approaches, ExplorViz utilizes WebGL and other browser technologies instead of a game engine to render its visualizations. As a result, we achieve a platform-independent interoperability that is crucial for (remote) collaboration. Here, users can explore the same visualization via our collaboratively usable desktop, virtual reality, and also augmented reality modes. Our prototype follows the Twelve-Factor App methodology to build a cloud-native application that comprises multiple scalable microservices. Thanks to horizontal scaling, our implementation is capable to analyze a large amount of visualization data; thus, allowing multiple users to simultaneously use the software visualization service. We conducted a set of preliminary performance exper-iments to benchmark our prototype's scalability. Results show that the evaluated service scales linearly with increasing load.