From Toy to Tool: Extending Tag Clouds for Software and Information Visualisation

Software visualisation employs techniques from the more general information visualisation field to help software engineers comprehend and manage the size and complexity of software systems. The scale and complexity of the software engineering domain pose significant challenges and it is important to make effective use of techniques which can be adapted effectively to support tasks in this context. In this paper, we extend significantly the tag cloud concept, transforming it from a simple toy into a powerful tool which can help address challenges inherent in software visualisation. We illustrate our approach with examples drawn from our software engineering research programme and describe Taggle, a tool which implements our techniques. Our visualisations support developers as they search, filter, browse, explore and act upon data and are a useful addition to the software visualisation tool kit.