Visualizing live software systems in 3D

ABSTRACT

The analysis of the runtime behavior of a software system yields vast amounts of information, making accurate interpretations difficult. Filtering or compression techniques are often applied to reduce the volume of data without loss of key information vital for a specific analysis goal. Alternatively, visualization is generally accepted as a means of effectively representing large amounts of data. The challenge lies in creating effective and expressive visual representations that not only allows for a global picture, but also enables us to inspect the details of the large data sets. We define the focus of our analysis to be the runtime behavior of features. Static structural visualizations of a system are typically represented in two dimensions. We exploit a third dimension to visually represent the dynamic information, namely object instantiations and message sends. We introduce a novel 3D visualization technique that supports animation of feature behavior and integrates zooming, panning, rotating and on-demand details. As proof of concept, we apply our visualization technique to feature execution traces of an example system.

REFERENCES

• 1: Elliot J. Chikofsky , James H. Cross II, Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy, IEEE Software, v.7 n.1, p.13-17, January 1990 [doi>10.1109/52.43044]
• 2: Wim De Pauw , Richard Helm , Doug Kimelman , John Vlissides, Visualizing the behavior of object-oriented systems, Proceedings of the eighth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.326-337, September 26-October 01, 1993, Washington, D.C., United States
• 3: Stéphane Ducasse , Michele Lanza , Roland Bertuli, High-Level Polymetric Views of Condensed Run-time Information, Proceedings of the Eighth Euromicro Working Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'04), p.309, March 24-26, 2004
• 4: Ducasse, S., Gîrba, T., Lanza, M., and Demeyer, S. 2005. Moose: a collaborative and extensible reengineering environment. In Tools for Software Maintenance and Reengineering, RCOST/Software Technology Series. Franco Angeli, Milano, 55--71.
• 5: Stéphane Ducasse , Lukas Renggli , Roel Wuyts, SmallWiki: a meta-described collaborative content management system, Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Wikis, p.75-82, October 16-18, 2005, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/1104973.1104981]
• 6: Thomas Eisenbarth , Rainer Koschke , Daniel Simon, Locating Features in Source Code, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.29 n.3, p.210-224, March 2003 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2003.1183929]
• 7: Ernst, E. 2003. Higher-order hierarchies. In Proceedins of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Springer Verlag, Darmstadt, Germany, LNCS.
• 8: Fowler, M. 2003. UML Distilled. Addison Wesley.
• 9: Orla Greevy , Stéphane Ducasse, Correlating Features and Code Using a Compact Two-Sided Trace Analysis Approach, Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, p.314-323, March 21-23, 2005 [doi>10.1109/CSMR.2005.21]
• 10: Orla Greevy , Stéphane Ducasse , Tudor Girba, Analyzing Feature Traces to Incorporate the Semantics of Change in Software Evolution Analysis, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.347-356, September 25-30, 2005 [doi>10.1109/ICSM.2005.22]
• 11: O. Greevy , M. Lanza , C. Wysseier, Visualizing Feature Interaction in 3-D, Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis, p.30, September 25-25, 2005 [doi>10.1109/VISSOF.2005.1684317]
• 12: Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj , Edna Braun , Daniel Amyot , Timothy Lethbridge, Recovering Behavioral Design Models from Execution Traces, Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, p.112-121, March 21-23, 2005 [doi>10.1109/CSMR.2005.46]
• 13: Dean F. Jerding , John T. Stasko , Thomas Ball, Visualizing interactions in program executions, Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineering, p.360-370, May 17-23, 1997, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/253228.253356]
• 14: Michael F. Kleyn , Paul C. Gingrich, GraphTrace—understanding object-oriented systems using concurrently animated views, Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, p.191-205, September 25-30, 1988, San Diego, California, United States
• 15: Danny B. Lange , Yuichi Nakamura, Interactive visualization of design patterns can help in framework understanding, Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.342-357, October 15-19, 1995, Austin, Texas, United States
• 16: Lange, D., and Nakamura, Y. 1995. Object-oriented program tracing and visualization. Research Report RT0111, IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory.
• 17: Michele Lanza , Stéphane Ducasse, Polymetric Views-A Lightweight Visual Approach to Reverse Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.29 n.9, p.782-795, September 2003 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2003.1232284]
• 18: Michele Lanza, CodeCrawler - Lessons Learned in Building a Software Visualization Tool, Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, p.409, March 26-28, 2003
• 19: Jonathan I. Maletic , Andrian Marcus , Michael L. Collard, ATask Oriented View of Software Visualization, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis, p.32, June 26-26, 2002
• 20: Andrian Marcus , Louis Feng , Jonathan I. Maletic, 3D representations for software visualization, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, June 11-13, 2003, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/774833.774837]
• 21: Oscar Nierstrasz , Stéphane Ducasse , Tudor Gǐrba, The story of moose: an agile reengineering environment, Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.1-10, September 05-09, 2005, Lisbon, Portugal
• 22: Steven P. Reiss, Visualizing Java in action, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, June 11-13, 2003, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/774833.774842]
• 23: R. Sharp , A. Rountev, Interactive Exploration of UML Sequence Diagrams, Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis, p.8, September 25-25, 2005 [doi>10.1109/VISSOF.2005.1684295]
• 24: Stasko, J. T., Domingue, J., Brown, M. H., and Price, B. A., Eds. 1998. Software Visualization --- Programming as a Multimedia Experience. The MIT Press.
• 25: M.-A. D. Storey , H. A. Muller, Manipulating and documenting software structures using SHriMP views, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.275, October 17-20, 1995
• 26: M.-A. D. Storey , F. D. Fracchia , H. A. Müller, Cognitive design elements to support the construction of a mental model during software exploration, Journal of Systems and Software, v.44 n.3, p.171-185, Jan. 1, 1999 [doi>10.1016/S0164-1212(98)10055-9]
• 27: Eleni Stroulia , Tarja Systä, Dynamic analysis for reverse engineering and program understanding, ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review, v.10 n.1, p.8-17, Spring 2002 [doi>10.1145/568235.568237]
• 28: Jean-Yves Vion-Dury , Miguel Santana, Virtual images: interactive visualization of distributed object-oriented systems, Proceedings of the ninth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, language, and applications, p.65-84, October 23-28, 1994, Portland, Oregon, United States
• 29: Robert J. Walker , Gail C. Murphy , Bjorn Freeman-Benson , Darin Wright , Darin Swanson , Jeremy Isaak, Visualizing dynamic software system information through high-level models, Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.271-283, October 18-22, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 30: Norman Wilde , Michael C. Scully, Software reconnaissance: mapping program features to code, Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, v.7 n.1, p.49-62, Jan.-Feb. 1995 [doi>10.1002/smr.4360070105]
• 31: Wysseier, C. 2004. CCJun -- polymetric views in three-dimensional space. Informatikprojekt, University of Berne, June.
• 32: Wysseier, C. 2005. Interactive 3-D Visualization of Feature-Traces. MSc. thesis, University of Berne, Switzerland.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Graphical environments

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Tracing
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Interactive environments
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering

  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

General Terms:
Design, Verification

Keywords:
3D visualization, dynamic analysis, feature traces, reverse engineering