Software is intangible and knowledge about software systems is typically tacit. The mental model of software developers is thus an important factor in software engineering. It is our vision that developers should be able to refer to code as being "up in the north", "over in the west", or "down-under in the south". We want to provide developers, and everyone else involved in software development, with a *shared*, spatial and stable mental model of their software project. We aim to reinforce this by embedding a cartographic visualization in the IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The visualization is always visible in the bottom-left, similar to the GPS navigation device for car drivers. For each development task, related information is displayed on the map. In this paper we present CODEMAP, an eclipse plug-in, and report on preliminary results from an ongoing user study with professional developers and students.
CodeCity is an explorative environment based on the city metaphor @cite_5 . CodeCity employs the nesting level of packages for their city's elevation model, and uses a modified tree layout to position packages and classes. Order is based on size, so the layout is not stable over time. CodeCity is not integrated into an IDE, but built in top of the Moose reverse-engineering platform that offers post-mortem analysis of abstract models only.
@cite_5
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This paper presents software visualization tool that utilizes the modified city metaphor to represent software system and related analysis data in virtual reality environment. To better address all three kinds of software aspects we propose a new layouting algorithm that provides a higher level of detail and position the buildings according to the coupling between classes that they represent. Resulting layout allows us to visualize software metrics and source code modifications at the granularity of methods, visualize method invocations involved in program execution and to support the remodularization analysis. To further reduce the cognitive load and increase efficiency of 3D visualization we allow users to observe and interact with our city in immersive virtual reality environment that also provides a source code browsing feature. We demonstrate the use of our approach on two open-source systems.