Coherent Software Cities

Coherent Software Cities are a software visualization approach which adopts the city metaphor to support the comprehension of various aspects of evolving software systems. For this purpose, the approach implements a three-staged modeling chain yielding coherent sets of application specific visualizations. In this context, a new layout approach for software cities is presented, which explicitly takes development history into account. Its effects are twofold: First, evolution becomes visible in the layouts, which allows for supporting new application scenarios. Second, layouts evolve smoothly and stable during system evolution, which allows software cities to be used online, i.e. during ongoing system development and maintenance.