Communicating Software Architecture using a Unified Single-View Visualization

Software is among the most complex human artifacts, and visualization is widely acknowledged as important to understanding software. In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding a software system´s architecture through visualization. Whereas traditional visualizations use multiple stakeholder-specific views to present different kinds of task- specific information, we propose an additional visualization technique that unifies the presentation of various kinds of architecture-level information, thereby allowing a variety of stakeholders to quickly see and communicate current development, quality, and costs of a software system. For future empirical evaluation of multi-aspect, single-view architectural visualizations, we have implemented our idea in an existing visualization tool, Vizz3D. Our implementation includes techniques, such as the use of a city metaphor, that reduce visual complexity in order to support single-view visualizations of large-scale programs.