Software systems as cities a controlled experiment

Software visualization is a popular program comprehension technique used in the context of software maintenance, reverse engineering, and software evolution analysis. While there is a broad range of software visualization approaches, only few have been empirically evaluated. This is detrimental to t...

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Veröffentlicht in:2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) S. 551 - 560
Hauptverfasser: Wettel, Richard, Lanza, Michele, Robbes, Romain
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York, NY, USA ACM 21.05.2011
IEEE
Schriftenreihe:ACM Conferences
Schlagworte:
Cities and towns
Data visualization
empirical validation
Industries
Maintenance engineering
Measurement
Software
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software post-development issues > Software reverse engineering
software visualization
Visualization
software visualization
empirical validation
ISBN:9781450304450, 1450304451
ISSN:0270-5257
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:Software visualization is a popular program comprehension technique used in the context of software maintenance, reverse engineering, and software evolution analysis. While there is a broad range of software visualization approaches, only few have been empirically evaluated. This is detrimental to the acceptance of software visualization in both the academic and the industrial world. We present a controlled experiment for the empirical evaluation of a 3D software visualization approach based on a city metaphor and implemented in a tool called CodeCity. The goal is to provide experimental evidence of the viability of our approach in the context of program comprehension by having subjects perform tasks related to program comprehension. We designed our experiment based on lessons extracted from the current body of research. We conducted the experiment in four locations across three countries, involving 41 participants from both academia and industry. The experiment shows that CodeCity leads to a statistically significant increase in terms of task correctness and decrease in task completion time. We detail the experiment we performed, discuss its results and reflect on the many lessons learned.
ISBN:9781450304450
1450304451
ISSN:0270-5257
DOI:10.1145/1985793.1985868