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.
In the software visualization literature however, topic maps are rarely used. Except for the use of graph splatting in RE Toolkit by Telea al @cite_10 , we are unaware of their prior application in software visualization.
@cite_10
2030016008
Information visualization has been acknowledged as an important tool in software decision support. But usually visualizations are static and just used for presentation rather than exploration. Interactive statistical data visualization can be used as a powerful tool which reaches beyond the limits of static graphs. We developed code mapping, a software platform for visualization and manipulation of complex and large software portfolios. Code mapping builds data-rich, graphical representations that are color-coded for function, call position and experimental interaction data. The functions implemented in code mapping allow collaboration and organization of software architecture diagrams in a visual model format; this feature is especially useful for Web services development and other Internet application code. The aim of this paper is to describe a tool which helps to visualize the software development and to present a new way to visualize software in a three-dimensional CAVE spl reg environment.