Advanced Visual Metaphors and Techniques for Software Maps
Daniel Limberger, Willy Scheibel, Jürgen Döllner, Matthias Trapp · 2019
Software maps provide a general-purpose interactive user interface and information display for software analytics tools. This paper systematically introduces and classifies software maps as a treemap-based technique for software cartography. It provides an overview of advanced visual metaphors and techniques, each suitable for interactive visual analytics tasks, that can be used to enhance the expressiveness of software maps. Thereto, the metaphors and techniques are briefly described, located within a visualization pipeline model, and considered within the software map design space. Consequent applications and use cases w.r.t. different types of software system data and software engineering data are discussed, arguing for a versatile use of software maps in visual software analytics.