Lucian Voinea

Many visualization tools offer software professionals insights to large-scale system architectures. However, despite recent advances in the software-visualization field and significant investments in constructing effective tools, few of these tools have a prominent effect on the software industry. The authors analyze the possible causes of this state of affairs, based on their industry experience. They argue for framing visualization tool adoption in a lean development setting as a value-added versus waste proposition. They examine this model for three types of potential visualization stakeholders: technical users, project managers, and consultants. For each stakeholder type, they observe different values and waste definitions and derive potential adoption guidelines for visualization tools.

Авторы:

• Lucian Voinea,
• Alex Telea,
• Hans Sassenburg

We present a software framework for mining software repositories. Our extensible framework enables the integration of data extraction from repositories with data analysis and interactive visualization. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by presenting several case studies performed on industry-size software repositories. In each study we use the framework to give answers to one or several software engineering questions addressing a specific project. Next, we validate the answers by comparing them with existing project documentation, by interviewing domain experts and by detailed analyses of the source code. The results show that our framework can be used both for supporting case studies on mining software repository techniques and for building end-user tools for software maintenance support.

Авторы:

• Lucian Voinea,
• Alex Telea

Software visual analytics (SVA) tools combine static program analysis and fact extraction with information visualization to support program comprehension. However, building efficient and effective SVA tools is highly challenging, as it involves extensive software development in program analysis, graphics, information visualization, and interaction. We present a SVA toolset for software maintenance, and detail two of its components which target software structure, metrics and code duplication. We illustrate the toolset’s usage for constructing software visualizations with examples in education, research, and industrial contexts. We discuss the design evolution from research prototypes to integrated, scalable, and easy-to-use products, and present several guidelines for the development of efficient and effective SVA solutions.

Авторы:

• Lucian Voinea,
• Alex Telea,
• Dennie Reniers,
• Ozan Ersoy

Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. In this paper, we present an adaptation of the visual analytics framework to the context of software understanding for maintenance. We discuss the similarities and differences of the general visual analytics context with the software maintenance context, and present in detail an instance of a visual software analytics application for the build optimization of large-scale code bases. Our application combines and adapts several data mining and information visualization techniques in answering several questions that help developers in assessing and reducing the build cost of such code bases by means of user-driven, interactive analysis techniques.

Авторы:

• Lucian Voinea,
• Alex Telea