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.
Jucknath-John al present a technique to achieve stable graph layouts over the evolution of the displayed software system @cite_20 , thus achieving consistent layout, while sidestepping the issue of reflecting meaningful position or distance metrics.
@cite_20
2045414386
Most models are expressed and visualized with UML nowadays and most UML diagrams are based on graphs. Such graphs can get quite large if a project contains more than 600 class files, which is not uncommon. But changes are hard to recognize in a graph with 600 nodes. Therefore, the user has to find a way to build his own mental map based on the original graph. This mental map should give an overview of the original graph size, structure and it should point to changed areas.We present in this paper an approach, which gives the user a smaller graph as a mental map. This smaller graph uses packages as foundations for nodes and displays the package's content as the node icon. This had be done beforehand to visualize the evolution of developer dependencies over time, where the node icon presented the package's developer information as a pie chart. A suitable icon to present a package's class diagram can be a smaller version of the class diagram itself, if the layout respects its predecessors to allow the user an overview of its evolution.