Visualization-based Analysis of Quality
for Large-scale Software Systems
Guillaume Langelier,
Houari A. Sahraoui, and
Pierre Poulin
Proc. IEEE/ACM International
Conference on Automated Software Engineering, December 2005
ACM Sigsoft Distinguished Paper Award.
Abstract
We propose an approach for complex software analysis based
on visualization. Our work is motivated by the fact that in
spite of years of research and practice, software development
and maintenance are still time and resource consuming, and
high-risk activities. The most important reason in our opinion
is the complexity of many phenomena related to software,
such as its evolution and its reliability. In fact, there is
very little theory explaining them. Today, we have a unique
opportunity to empirically study these phenomena, thanks
to large sets of software data available through open-source
programs and open repositories. Automatic analysis techniques,
such as statistics and machine learning, are usually
limited when studying phenomena with unknown or poorlyunderstood
influence factors. We claim that hybrid techniques
that combine automatic analysis with human expertise
through visualization are excellent alternatives to them.
In this paper, we propose a visualization framework that
supports quality analysis of large-scale software systems. We
circumvent the problem of size by exploiting perception capabilities
of the human visual system.
Keywords
Software visualization, metaphor, software quality, metrics.
BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{langelier-ase2005,
title = "Visualization-based Analysis of Quality for Large-scale Software Systems",
author = "Guillaume Langelier and Houari A. Sahraoui and Pierre Poulin",
booktitle = "IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering 2005",
year = "2005",
month = nov,
pages = "214-223"
}
Online version
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