Visualization of Codes and Code Smells with 3D Mushroom Farm Metaphor

Code visualization presents a visual representation of the state of the code to support code comprehension activities. In addition to representing code elements (for example, methods, classes and packages) and relationships between them, previous studies of code visualization also represent metrics to indicate code smell. However, the metric value only shows vague symptoms in describing the code smell behind it. This study tries to visualize the code smell directly using detection strategies, which are formulation of one or more than one metric and its threshold value for each type of code smell. ‘Smelly’ elements are immediately shown in code visualization according to the predetermined detection strategies. 3D mushroom farm metaphor is a new metaphor proposed in this study for code visualization. Through code visualization in a familiar natural 3D environment, code properties are displayed in an attractive manner. The presented code properties are chosen by considering object-oriented paradigm key ideas. During this time, there has never been a fundamental reason as to why a specific property was chosen to be included in a code visualization metaphor. Therefore, this study questioned code properties visualized to participants of the evaluation: is the early comprehension of the code sufficient enough or should it be added/reduced. The evaluation results showed that the code smell that was immediately shown in the visualization could be captured by the user correctly. All evaluated participants managed to identify all the smelly elements. Broadly speaking, participants understood the purpose of visualization and agreed that code visualization with the 3D mushroom farm metaphor is intuitive and easy to use. All participants stated that they needed all code properties displayed in code visualization with the 3D mushroom farm metaphor, although there were participants who proposed several properties to be added to the visualization.