Software Visualization (Dagstuhl Seminar 01211)
Stephan Diehl, Peter Eades, John Stasko · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2002
It is often said that humans have never before created any artifacts which are as complex as todays software systems.As a result creating, maintaining, understanding and teaching software is a challenging task.Software is neither matter nor energy, it is just a kind of information.Sometimes the representation and the information itself are confused.Software visualization is concerned with visually representing different aspects of software including its structure, execution and evolution.So far, research on software visualization was mostly motivated by its potential to support teaching.Many systems have been developed to facilitate the production of algorithm animations.At Dagstuhl software enginieers and re-engineers repeatedly argued that there is a strong need for software visualization in their areas.Here further research includes the use of techniques from information visualization to display sofware metrics, graph layout and graph animations to show the structure and changes in software systems and program animation for debugging.At the seminar more than 50 researchers from all around the world discussed the state-of-the-art as well as challenging questions for the future of software visualization.The program included 38 presentations and 15 system demonstrations, as well as several sessions for group discussions. Participants of the seminar volunteered• to compile a post seminar proceedings, which is to be published as a Springer LNCS state-of-the-art survey.• to create a repository with algorithm animations and software visualization tools• to initiate an international conference series on software visualization.We feel that the seminar was a seminal event.The future will tell whether it reached its ambitious goals to form a community and raise awareness of software visualization as a challenging and important research field of its own.