Towards empirically validated software architecture visualization

Authors:
Jens Knodel;Dirk Muthig;Matthias Naab;Dirk Zeckzer
Affiliations:
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE);Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE);Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE);Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Venue:
SoftVis '06 Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Software visualization
Year:
2006

Citing 1
Cited 2

Static Evaluation of Software Architectures

CSMR '06 Proceedings of the Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering

MultiVizArch: multiple graphical layouts for visualizing software architecture

Crossroads
An experiment on the role of graphical elements in architecture visualization

Empirical Software Engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Visualization is a sound means to facilitate understanding of complex correlations and offers a broad variety of concepts. A problem with the visualization of software architectures is that there are almost no empirical evidences of the benefits of particular visualization concepts. That is why we introduce an approach that explicitly integrates architecture development with the selection, use and validation of visualization metaphors. We successfully applied this approach to realize our software architecture visualization tool and empirically validated the use of the visualization concepts in the software architecture domain. We claim that software architecture visualizations should always be thoroughly assessed, especially by software architects in an industrial environment.