A Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation of Software Visualization Tools

Recently, many software visualization (SV) techniques and tools have become available to developers in order to help them understand their software. In our project, firstly, we identified a list of SV tools that we described, and evaluated qualitatively using the taxonomy of Price et al. Our experience with this taxonomy as well as the impact of the qualitative evaluation on Bell Canada will be discussed in this paper. Then, a quantitative evaluation was conducted in spring 2000 with more than 100 participants. In this paper, we especially put the emphases on the perspectives of the results, by reporting on our experiences and by discussing the major findings and their impact.

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