Software visualizations can provide a concise overview of a complex software system. Unfortunately, since software has no physical shape, there is no natural'' mapping of software to a two-dimensional space. As a consequence most visualizations tend to use a layout in which position and distance have no meaning, and consequently layout typical diverges from one visualization to another. We propose a consistent layout for software maps in which the position of a software artifact reflects its vocabulary, and distance corresponds to similarity of vocabulary. We use latent semantic indexing (LSI) to map software artifacts to a vector space, and then use multidimensional scaling (MDS) to map this vector space down to two dimensions.The resulting consistent layout allows us to develop a variety of thematic software maps that express very different aspects of software while making it easy to compare them. The approach is especially suitable for comparing views of evolving software, since the vocabulary of software artifacts tends to be stable over time.
CGA Call Graph Analyser is an explorative environment that visualizes a combination of function call graph and nested modules structure @cite_22 . The tool employs a 2 @math -dimensional approach. To our best knowledge, their visualizations use an arbitrary layout.
@cite_22
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In this paper we describe the application of our tool (CGA) for locating and understanding functionality in unfamiliar code of complex software systems onto the Gnu compiler collection GCC (approx. 1 million lines of C-code). The analysis' goal is to identify and understand those code locations that implement GCC's functionality of 'parsing constructors in C++ programs'.