3D Hierarchical Edge Bundles to Visualize Relations in a Software City Metaphor

Pierre Caserta (1) , Olivier Zendra (1) , Damien Bodénès (1)

1 TRIO - Real time and interoperability

Software systems are often very complex because of their huge size and the tremendous number of interactions between their components. However, understanding relations between software elements is crucial to optimize the development and the maintenance process. A good way to ease this understanding of software relations is to use advanced visualization techniques to graphically see interactions between elements. Nevertheless representing those software relations is not an easy task and often leads to hard to understand clutter. We believe that combining both edge clustering techniques and real-world metaphors can help to address this issue, producing easier-to-read visualizations that ease the cognitive process and thus significantly help understanding the underlying software. In this paper, we explain how we adapted the existing 2D Hierarchical Edge bundles technique to represent relations in a 3D space on top of city metaphors.

Mots clés: Visualization of Software; Software Relations; Software Maintenance; Human Perception; Hierarchical Edge Bundles

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Pierre Caserta, Olivier Zendra, Damien Bodénès. 3D Hierarchical Edge Bundles to Visualize Relations in a Software City Metaphor. 6th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT 2011), Sep 2011, Williamsburg, United States. ⟨inria-00613725v2⟩