How does 3-D visualization work in software engineering?: empirical study of a 3-D version/module visualization system
Hideki Koike, Hui-Chu Chu · International Conference on Software Engineering · 1998
Version control and module management are very important in practical software development. In UNIX, RCS or SCCS is used in general as version control tools. They, however, have a couple of drawbacks. This paper proposed a solution for these issues by applying 3D visualization. The prototype system, VRCS, was developed. In our system, version information stored in the RCS history file is displayed as a 2D tree by taking the z-axis as time. Other 2D trees are laid out in 3D space in the same way. In our visualization, files which compose a certain release of the software are connected by a line called a relation link. By using GUIs, users can check in/out each version easily and interactively. More importantly, just by choosing the relation link, a certain release is rebuilt automatically. Three comparative experiments between VRCS and RCS were conducted to know the effectiveness of VRCS. The result shows that VRCS is faster in checking in/out than RCS.