Taimur Khan

Visualization and Evolution of Software Architectures

Software systems are an integral component of our everyday life as we find them in tools and embedded in equipment all around us. In order to ensure smooth, predictable, and accurate operation of these systems, it is crucial to produce and maintain systems that are highly reliable. A well-designed and well-maintained architecture goes a long way in achieving this goal. However, due to the intangible and often complex nature of software architecture, this task can be quite complicated. The field of software architecture visualization aims to ease this task by providing tools and techniques to examine the hierarchy, relationship, evolution, and quality of architecture components. In this paper, we present a discourse on the state of the art of software architecture visualization techniques. Further, we highlight the importance of developing solutions tailored to meet the needs and requirements of the stakeholders involved in the analysis process.

eCITY: A Tool to Track Software Structural Changes Using an Evolving City

One of the main challenges in the maintenance of large-scale software systems is to ascertain the underlying software structure and to analyze its evolution. In this paper we present a tool to assist software architects and developers in not only understanding the software structure of their system but more importantly to track the insertion, removal, or modification of components over time. The tool is based on the idea that the above-mentioned stakeholders should have an intuitive, efficient, and effective means to detect when, where, and what structural changes took place. The main components include an interactive visualization that provides an overview of these changes. The usefulness of this approach is highlighted through a summary of a user study we conducted.

A Survey of Interaction Techniques and Devices for Large High Resolution Displays

Innovations in large high-resolution wall-sized displays have been yielding benefits to visualizations in industry and academia, leading to a rapidly growing increase of their implementations. In scenarios such as these, the displayed visual information tends to be larger than the users field of view, hence the necessity to move away from traditional interaction methods towards more suitable interaction devices and techniques. This paper aspires to explore the state-of-the-art with respect to such technologies for large high-resolution displays.

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.

eCITY+: A Tool to Analyze Software Architectural Relations through Interactive Visual Support

Current tools to analyze software architecture structure and its evolution tend to focus more towards exploring the architectural elements, their quality measures, and their evolution as compared to the information contained in the inter-dependencies of the system itself. In this tool demo paper, we present our eCITY+ tool that provides an interactive visualization aimed at assisting software engineers and architects to additionally comprehend the architectural ties between software components. Further, it shows how these relations evolve over time. To achieve these goals, eCITY+ represents architectural relationships as hierarchical edge bundles on top of an evolving software city metaphor and unravels the evolution of these relations through the use of animations. Additionally, we present a discussion on the challenges while implementing these ideas in the large.

An Interactive Approach for Inspecting Software System Measurements

In recent times, visual analysis has become increasingly important, especially in the area of software measurement, as most of the data from software measurement is multivariate. In this regard, standard software analysis tools are limited by their lack of ability to process huge collections of multidimensional data sets; current tools are designed to either support only well-known metrics or are too complicated to use for generating custom software metrics. Furthermore, the analyst requires extensive knowledge of the underlying data schemas and the relevant querying language. To address these shortcomings, we propose an interactive visual approach that 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 to understand software measurement and analysis data.

eCITY: Evolutionary Software Architecture Visualization – An Evaluation

An essential component in the evolution and maintenance of large-scale software systems is to track the structure of a software system to explain how a system has evolved to its present state and to predict its future development. Current mainstream tools facilitating the structural evolution of software architecture by visualization are confined with easy to integrate visualization techniques such as node-link diagrams, while more applicable solutions have been proposed in academic research. To bridge this gap, we have incorporated additional views to a conventional tool that integrates an interactive evolving city layout and a combination of charts. However, due to a limited access to the stakeholders it was not possible to solicit them for a formal modeling process. Instead, an early prototype was developed and a controlled experiment was conducted to illustrate the vital role of such in-situ visualization techniques when aiming to understanding the evolution of software architecture.