Towards Well Planned Code Cities

First Name: Natalia
Last Name: Tymchuk
Type: Talk
Abstract:
Software visualization has been shown as effective to support program and system comprehension. A possible solution adopts the city metaphor, and visualizes software systems as 3D cities.  Most of the existing implementations, like CodeCity, exploit rectangle packing layout for placing the entities in a compact positioning. However, the distance between elements is determined by the layout algorithm only, without any connection to the actual structure of the system and the relations between software entities, which are fundamental for comprehension and maintenance.

We are currently investigating a new 3D representation for visualizing large software systems as cities. In our tool, we exploit force based layout to place software entities like classes and packages based on their relations, for example by considering client dependency. Our cities look more ``organic'', characterized by dependent entities grouped together, and less coupled entities more far away from each other.

Bio: I'm a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Informatics of University of Lugano. I am working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Michele Lanza, in the REVEAL research group. My main topic is how to improve the visualization of software systems in a useful and realistic way. On the last ESUG I presented Voronoi diagram builder, while  2 years ago I worked on the project “SciSmalltalk - Ordinary Differential Equations Solver” in GSoC.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/esug/towards-well-planned-code-cities