Quality Improvement Through Visualization of Software and Systems

Many organizations still lack support for obtaining control over their system development processes and for determining the performance of their processes and the quality of the produced products. Systematic support for detecting and reacting to critical process and product states in order to achieve planned goals is often missing. As systems and software become bigger and more complex, classic approaches reach their limits, due to the difficulty of extracting relevant information from a large volume of measures. Here, suitable visualization and virtual reality solutions can offer a clear advantage by representing the relevant information in a more easily recognizable form. However, many resulting visualizations are still hard to understand, even for experts. This opens the door for researching modern, human-centered approaches that provide the user with visualization and interaction models for visually analyzing and understanding the underlying complex data. This chapter focuses on two main topics: system visualization and software visualization.