We introduce Code Park, a novel tool for visualizing codebases in a 3D game-like environment. Code Park aims to improve a programmer's understanding of an existing codebase in a manner that is both engaging and intuitive, appealing to novice users such as students. It achieves these goals by laying out the codebase in a 3D park-like environment. Each class in the codebase is represented as a 3D room-like structure. Constituent parts of the class (variable, member functions, etc.) are laid out on the walls, resembling a syntax-aware "wallpaper". The users can interact with the codebase using an overview, and a first-person viewer mode. We conducted two user studies to evaluate Code Park's usability and suitability for organizing an existing project. Our results indicate that Code Park is easy to get familiar with and significantly helps in code understanding compared to a traditional IDE. Further, the users unanimously believed that Code Park was a fun tool to work with.
There is a body of work available in the literature on software visualization @cite_32 @cite_39 @cite_27 @cite_19 @cite_25 @cite_23 @cite_24 . We direct the reader to comprehensive surveys of different methods available in the work of Teyseyre and Campo @cite_38 and also Caserta and Olivier @cite_34 . For example SeeSoft @cite_28 , one of the earliest visualization metaphors, allows one to analyze up to 50,000 lines of code by mapping each line of code into a thin row. Marcus @cite_6 added a new dimension to SeeSoft to support an abstraction mechanism to achieve better representation of higher dimensional data.
@cite_38 @cite_28 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_39 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_34 @cite_25
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The Seesoft software visualization system allows one to analyze up to 50000 lines of code simultaneously by mapping each line of code into a thin row. The color of each row indicates a statistic of interest, e.g., red rows are those most recently changed, and blue are those least recently changed. Seesoft displays data derived from a variety of sources, such as version control systems that track the age, programmer, and purpose of the code (e.g., control ISDN lamps, fix bug in call forwarding); static analyses, (e.g., locations where functions are called); and dynamic analyses (e.g., profiling). By means of direct manipulation and high interaction graphics, the user can manipulate this reduced representation of the code in order to find interesting patterns. Further insight is obtained by using additional windows to display the actual code. Potential applications for Seesoft include discovery, project management, code tuning, and analysis of development methodologies. > The paper presents a new 3D representation for visualizing large software systems. The origins of this representation can be directly traced to the SeeSoft metaphor. This work extends these visualization mechanisms by utilizing the third dimension, texture, abstraction mechanism, and by supporting new manipulation techniques and user interfaces. By utilizing a 3D representation we can better represent higher dimensional data than previous 2D views. An overview of our prototype tool and its basic functionality is given. Applications of this method to particular software engineering tasks are also discussed. A key problem in software engineering is changing the code. We present a sequence of visualizations and visual metaphors designed to help engineers understand and manage the software change process. The principal metaphors are matrix views, cityscapes, bar and pie charts, data sheets and networks. Linked by selection mechanisms, multiple views are combined to form perspectives that both enable discovery of high-level structure in software change data and allow effective access to details of those data. Use of the views and perspectives is illustrated in two important contexts: understanding software change by exploration of software change data and management of software development. Our approach complements existing visualizations of software structure and software execution. Software visualization can be very useful for answering complex questions that arise in the software development process. Although modern visualization engines offer expressive APIs for building such visualizations, developers often have difficulties to (1) identify a suitable visualization technique to answer their particular development question, and to (2) implement that visualization using the existing APIs. Examples that illustrate the usage of an engine to build concrete visualizations offer a good starting point, but developers may have to traverse long lists of categories and analyze examples one-by-one to find a suitable one. We propose MetaVis, a tool that fills the gap between existing visualization techniques and their practical applications during software development. We classify questions frequently formulated by software developers and for each, based on our expertise, identify suitable visualizations. MetaVis uses tags mined from these questions to offer a tag-iconic cloud-based visualization. Each tag links to suitable visualizations that developers can explore, modify and try out. We present initial results of an implementation of MetaVis in the Pharo programming environment. The tool visualizes 76 developers' questions assigned to 49 visualization examples.