Visualizing Software in an Immersive Virtual Reality Environment
Jonathan I. Maletic, Jason Leigh, Andrian Marcus · 2001
Introduction The problems faced by an individual trying to understand a software system are very difficult. As the size of software systems increases so do the complexities in understanding. A reasonable solution to this problem is the construction of software tools that assist us in the comprehension tasks. An obvious way to assist us with this problem is to build visual representation of the software. For example, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) uses a graphical notation to describe software in a visual manner. While these types of notations allow for an abstraction of an existing software system, they do not scale up well with respect to comprehension. That is, it is quite difficult to "see" an entire software system with these notations and tools. They suffer from the same cognitive related problems as source code. There is a critical factor limiting these notations (and other software visualization tools), namely they represent the information in only two visual dimen