Visualization-based analysis of quality for large-scale software systems

ABSTRACT

We propose an approach for complex software analysis based on visualization. Our work is motivated by the fact that in spite of years of research and practice, software development and maintenance are still time and resource consuming, and high-risk activities. The most important reason in our opinion is the complexity of many phenomena related to software, such as its evolution and its reliability. In fact, there is very little theory explaining them. Today, we have a unique opportunity to empirically study these phenomena, thanks to large sets of software data available through open-source programs and open repositories. Automatic analysis techniques, such as statistics and machine learning, are usually limited when studying phenomena with unknown or poorly-understood influence factors. We claim that hybrid techniques that combine automatic analysis with human expertise through visualization are excellent alternatives to them. In this paper, we propose a visualization framework that supports quality analysis of large-scale software systems. We circumvent the problem of size by exploiting perception capabilities of the human visual system.

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Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

    • Multimedia information systems

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software development techniques

      • Reusability

        • Software product lines

    • Software verification and validation

      • Empirical software validation

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language types

        • Object oriented languages

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software functional properties

      • Formal methods