Software Visualization with Audio Supported Cognitive Glyphs

Software Visualization with Audio Supported Cognitive Glyphs

inproceedings
Sandro Boccuzzo, Harald C. Gall
There exist numerous software visualization techniques that aim to facilitate program comprehension. One of the main concerns in every such software visualization is to identify relevant aspects fast and provide information in an effective way. In previous work, we developed a cognitive visualiza- tion technique and tool called CocoViz that uses common place metaphors for an intuitive understanding of software structures and evolution. In this paper, we address soft- ware comprehension by a combination of visualization and audio. Evolution and structural aspects are annotated with different audio to represent concepts such as design erosion, code smells or evolution metrics. We use audio concepts such as loudness, sharpness, tone pitch, roughness or oscil- lation and map those to properties of classes and packages. As such we provide an audio annotation of software entities along their version history for software analysis and soft- ware browsing. Our first results with the prototype and a small user study show that with this combination of visual and aural means we can facilitate program comprehension and provide additional information that usually is not pro- vided by current visualization approaches.
Software Visualization with Audio Supported Cognitive Glyphs
2008
IEEE Computer Society
Bijing China
24th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2008)
s.e.a.l.