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.
White Coats is an explorative environment also based on the notion of polymetric views @cite_11 . The visualizations are three-dimensional with position and visual-distance of entities given by selected metrics. However they do not incorporate the notion of a consistent layout.
@cite_11
1975005207
Versioning systems to store, handle, and retrieve the evolution of software systems have become a common good practice for both industrial and open-source software systems, currently exemplified by the wide usage of the CVS system. The stored information can then be manually retrieved over a command line or looked at with a browser using the ViewCVS tool. However, the information contained in the repository is difficult to navigate as ViewCVS provides only a textual view of single versions of the source files. In this paper we present an approach to visualize a CVS repository in 3D (using VRML) by means of a visualization service called White Coats. The viewer can easily navigate and interact with the visualized information