A Scalable Visualization for Dynamic Data in Software System Hierarchies
A Scalable Visualization for Dynamic Data in Software System Hierarchies
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DOI：
10.1109/vissoft.2017.16
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发表时间：
2017-09
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通讯作者：
Michael Burch;Michael Raschke;Adrian Zeyfang;D. Weiskopf
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文献类型：
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作者：
Michael Burch;Michael Raschke;Adrian Zeyfang;D. Weiskopf
软件系统可以变得更大，由数千个按层次组织的元素组成，如目录、子目录、文件和函数。此外，这些层次结构元素可以携带软件开发人员值得研究的附加信息。如果没有可视可伸缩可视化技术的支持，获取层次结构和附加的静态或动态数据的概览可能会成为一项乏味的任务。在本文中，我们使用基于缩进的视觉隐喻的层次可视化来生成软件系统层次的概述，并容易地附加附加属性。额外的信息与层次结构元素对齐，因此支持在不同层次的层次结构粒度上对附件进行可视比较。通过交互，我们提供关于数据的其他视图，例如，通过过滤、层次结构转换或按需提供详细信息。我们通过一个应用程序示例来说明我们的层次结构可视化技术的用处，该应用程序示例探索了来自开源软件项目jEdit的数据。我们通过用户实验研究了层次可视化的可读性，将缩进与不同大小的层次的节点链接图进行了比较。
Software systems can grow large, consisting of thousands of hierarchically organized elements like directories, subdirectories, files, and functions. Moreover, those hierarchy elements can carry additional information worth investigating for a software developer. Getting an overview of both the hierarchy and the attached static or dynamic data can become a tedious task if it is not supported by a visually scalable visualization technique. In this paper, we use a hierarchy visualization based on the visual metaphor of indentation to generate an overview of the software system hierarchy and easily attach additional attributes. The extra information is aligned with the hierarchy elements and, hence, supports visual comparisons of the attachments on different levels of hierarchical granularity. Through interaction, we provide additional views on the data, e.g., by filtering, hierarchy transformations, or details-on-demand. We illustrate the usefulness of our hierarchy visualization technique by means of an application example exploring data from the open-source software project jEdit. We investigated the readability of the hierarchy visualization with a user experiment, comparing indentation to node-link diagrams for varying sizes of a hierarchy.