Software Galaxies: Displaying Coding Activitiesusing a Galaxy Metaphor
Daniel Atzberger, Willy Scheibel, Daniel Limberger, Jürgen Döllner · 2021
Software visualization uses metaphors to depict software system and software development data that usually has no inherent gestalt. The choice of a fitting metaphor for visual display is researched broadly, but deriving a layout based on similarity is still challenging. We present a novel approach to 3D software visualization called Software Galaxy. Our layout is based on applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation on source code documents. We utilize a metaphor inspired from astronomy for depicting software metrics for single documents and clusters of documents. Our first experiments indicate that a 3D visualization capturing semantic relatedness can be beneficial for standard program comprehension tasks.