Novel visual representations for software metrics using 3D and animation

Abstract

The visualization of software metrics is an important step towards a better understanding of the software product to be developed. Software metrics are quantitative measurements of a piece of software, e.g., a class, a package, or a component. A good understanding of software metrics supports the identification of possible problems in the development process and helps to improve the software quality. In this paper, we present two possibilities how novel visual representations can support the user to discover interesting properties within the metric data set. The first one uses a new interactive 3D metaphor to overcome known problems in the visualization of the evolution of software metrics. Then, we focus on the usage of 2D animation to represent metric values. Both approaches were implemented and address different aspects in human-centered visualization, i.e., the design of visual metaphors that are intuitive from the user perspective in the first case as well as the support of patterns in motion to facilitate the visual perception of metric outliers in the second case.