Visualization of Evolution of Component-Based Software Architectures in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The visualization of software architectures by the use of effective and feasible visual metaphors provides an intuitive approach to comprehend the implemented architecture of a software project. In this regard not only the visualization of the latest status of the implemented architecture is important, but also the visualization of the history of software architectures. Such visualizations show dependencies and contexts in which design decisions were made. Resulting information supports programmers to understand systems and to recognize disadvantageous design decisions. A software which is particularly suited for the visualization of component-based software is IslandViz. This software visualizes OSGi-based software architectures in Virtual Reality with an island metaphor, but at this point the history of an architecture is not taken into account. In this paper we present how IslandViz can be extended to visualize the history of software architectures of OSGi-based software projects. For this purpose we use algorithms for dynamic graphs to realize a dynamic positioning of the islands and an adaptable layout of the regions on the islands. The aim is to ensure that the user´s orientation in the virtual environment is preserved even if elements of the visualization must adapt due to changes in the software history.