Software visualization is defined as “the use of the crafts of typography, graphic design, animation, and cinematography with modern human-computer interaction and computer graphics technology to facilitate both the human understanding and effective use of computer software.”(John T. Stasko et. al.). It is a specialization of information visualization, whose goal is to visualize any kind of abstract data, while in software visualization the sole focus lies on visualizing software.
Software visualization and reverse engineering: Software visualization has been widely used by the reverse engineering research community during the past two decades. Many of the approaches provide ways to uncover and navigate information about software systems. The graphical representations of software used in the field of software visualization, a sub-area of information visualization, have long been accepted as comprehension aids to support reverse engineering. Software visualization has become one of the major approaches in reverse engineering, Koschke reporting that 80% of interviewed researchers consider visualizations as being important or absolutely necessary in software reverse engineering.
The enormous interest in visualization as an aid for reverse engineering and problem detection can also be inferred from the large number of tools that have been developed for this purpose: Rigi, SHriMP, CodeCrawler, Mondrian, etc.
My interest in this domain appeared during my visit to SCG, during my diploma thesis, when I created a set of new visualization for Lisp systems, developed to underline the differences of the language and to help understand and browse complex Lisp systems. For more information see my diploma thesis.
Software visualization and reverse engineering: Software visualization has been widely used by the reverse engineering research community during the past two decades. Many of the approaches provide ways to uncover and navigate information about software systems. The graphical representations of software used in the field of software visualization, a sub-area of information visualization, have long been accepted as comprehension aids to support reverse engineering. Software visualization has become one of the major approaches in reverse engineering, Koschke reporting that 80% of interviewed researchers consider visualizations as being important or absolutely necessary in software reverse engineering.
The enormous interest in visualization as an aid for reverse engineering and problem detection can also be inferred from the large number of tools that have been developed for this purpose: Rigi, SHriMP, CodeCrawler, Mondrian, etc.
My interest in this domain appeared during my visit to SCG, during my diploma thesis, when I created a set of new visualization for Lisp systems, developed to underline the differences of the language and to help understand and browse complex Lisp systems. For more information see my diploma thesis.
