Software Cartography: thematic software visualization with consistent layout
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2008)
Embedding spatial software visualization in the IDE: an exploratory study
Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization
Representing development history in software cities
Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization
Code Gestalt: a software visualization tool for human beings
CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
BugMap: a topographic map of bugs
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
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Software visualizations can provide a concise overview of a complex software system.Unfortunately, since software has no physical shape, there is no ``natural'' mapping of software to a two-dimensional space. As a consequence most visualizations tend to use a layout in which position and distance have no meaning, and consequently layout typical diverges from one visualization to another.We propose a consistent layout for software maps in which the position of a software artifact reflects its vocabulary, and distance corresponds to similarity of vocabulary.We use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to map software artifacts to a vector space, and then use Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to map this vector space down to two dimensions.The resulting consistent layout allows us to develop a variety of thematic software maps that express very different aspects of software while making it easy to compare them.The approach is especially suitable for comparing views of evolving software, since the vocabulary of software artifacts tends to be stable over time.