Visually Analyzing the Structure and Code Quality of Component-based Web Applications

Monitoring code quality and dependencies is an important task to keep software maintainable. While generally well researched, only little work on visually analyzing code quality of component-based front-end web applications exists that considers the specifics of such software systems. We propose an approach to visualize dependencies and code quality metrics of component-based JavaScript React applications. Our prototype implementation uses a node-link diagram for dependency visualization, tailored to the specific component structure of React applications and enriched with various visual cues. It is linked with different panels to show code quality and exact source code locations. Recommendations on how the quality of the system under analysis can be improved and refactored are provided. We evaluated our prototype in a small user study with four participants and found that it helped in program comprehension tasks and finding refactoring opportunities.