Visualizing Data in Software Cities
Susanna Ardigò, Csaba Nagy, Roberto Minelli, Michele Lanza · 2021
The city metaphor for visualizing software systems in 3D has been widely explored and it has led to many diverse implementations and approaches. However, when looking at software systems in general, and when using specifically a city approach, it is evident that something is missing: The data. Indeed, software systems are intrinsically driven by data, which is usually managed using databases or often also simply stored in files coming in a variety of formats, such as CSV, XML, and JSON. While such data files are part of a project’s file system and can thus be easily retrieved, the situation is different for databases: A database is usually not contained in the file system, and its presence can only be inferred from the source code which contains the database accesses.We present an extension of the CodeCity implementation, M3TRICITY2, with two new contributions: First, we consider data files and use simple metrics to integrate them in the visualization seamlessly. Second, we present a novel way to add a database to the visualization by making use of the one remaining space left unused: the sky and the underground. We present our contributions and illustrate them on various software systems.