ExplorViz - Live Trace Visualization for System and Program Comprehension in Large Software Landscapes
Christian Zirkelbach · 2016
In many enterprises, the number of deployed applications is constantly increasing. Those applications - often several hundreds - form large software landscapes. The comprehension of such landscapes is frequently impeded due to, for instance, architectural erosion, personnel turnover, or changing requirements. Furthermore, events such as performance anomalies can often only be understood in correlation with the states of the applications. Therefore, an efficient and effective way to comprehend such software landscapes in combination with the details of each application is required. In order to face this challenge, we created ExplorViz - a live trace visualization approach to support system and program comprehension in large software landscapes. It features two perspectives: a landscape-level perspective using UML elements and an application-level perspective following the 3D software city metaphor. Our software is capable of monitoring, analyzing, and processing a huge amount of conducted method calls in large software landscapes. Furthermore, we utilize different display and interaction concepts for the software city metaphor beyond classical 2D displays and 2D pointing devices. We conducted several lab and controlled experiments to verify our approach. ExplorViz is available as open-source software on www.explorviz.net. Additionally, we provide extensive experimental packages of our evaluations to facilitate the verifiability and reproducibility of our results.