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Visualizing Software Metrics in a Software System Hierarchy

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Advances in Visual Computing (ISVC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 9475))

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Abstract

Various software metrics can be derived from a software system to measure inherent quantitative properties such a system can have or not. The general problem with these metrics is the fact that many of them may exist with varying values making an exploration of the raw metric data a challenging task. As another data dimension we have to deal with the hierarchical organization of the software system since we are also interested in software metric correlations or anomalies on different hierarchy levels. In this paper we introduce a visualization concept which shows the hierarchical organization of the software system on the one hand, but also the list of software metrics attached to each hierarchy level on the other hand. This interactive technique exploits the strengths of the human visual system that allow fast pattern recognition to derive similar or different metric patterns in the software hierarchy. The provided visualization technique targets the rapid finding of insights and knowledge in the typically vast amounts of multivariate and hierarchical software metric data. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach in a case study investigating more than 70 software metrics in the Eclipse open source software project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VISUS, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Michael Burch

Authors
  1. Michael Burch
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Correspondence to Michael Burch .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA

    Ioannis Pavlidis

  6. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

    Rogerio Feris

  7. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    Tim McGraw

  8. Side Effects Software, Santa Monica, California, USA

    Mark Elendt

  9. The DiVE, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Regis Kopper

  10. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    Eric Ragan

  11. Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

    Zhao Ye

  12. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Gunther Weber

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Burch, M. (2015). Visualizing Software Metrics in a Software System Hierarchy. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27863-6_69

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27863-6_69

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27862-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27863-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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