A Layered Software City for Dependency Visualization

A Software City is a an established way to visualize metrics such as the test coverage or complexity. As current layouting algorithms are mainly based on the static code structure (e.g., classes and packages), dependencies that are orthogonal to this structure often clutter the visualization and are hard to grasp. This paper applies layered graph drawing to layout a Software City in 3D. The proposed layout takes both the dependencies and the static code structure into account. This minimizes the number of explicitly displayed dependencies. The resulting lower cognitive load makes the software architecture easier to understand. We evaluate the advantages of our layout over a classic layouting algorithm in a controlled study on a real world project.

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