Visual analytics of software structure and metrics

In terms of software maintenance and comprehension, the fields of software engineering and software visualization have produced several methods and tools. However, they are typically separate tools in practice. In this paper, we present a novel methodology of combining software analysis and software visualization tools via an interactive visual workflow modeling approach. Standard software analysis tools are also limited in that they support only well-known metrics or are too complicated to use for generating custom software metrics. To address these shortcomings, our approach focuses on visual elements, their configurations, and interconnectivity rather than a data ontology and querying language. In order to test and validate our methodology, we developed a prototype tool called VIMETRIK (Visual Specification of Metrics). Our preliminary evaluation study illustrates the intuitiveness and ease-of-use of our approach with regard to understanding software measurement and analysis data.