Software in the city: visual guidance through large scale software projects

Abstract

The size of software projects at Microsoft are constantly increasing. This leads to the problem that developers and managers at Microsoft have trouble to comprehend and overview their own projects in detail. Regarding that there are some research projects at Microsoft with the goal to facilitate analyses on software projects. Those projects provide databases with metadata of the development process which developers, managers, and researchers can use. As an example, the data can be used for recommendation systems and bug analyses. In the research field of visualization software there are a lot of approaches that try to visualize large software projects. One approach which seems to reach that goal is the visualization of software with real life metaphors. This paper combines existing research projects at Microsoft with a visualization approach that uses the city metaphor. The goal is to guide managers and developers in their day to day development decisions and to improve the comprehension of their software projects.