Software visualization with audio supported cognitive glyphs

Abstract

There exist numerous software visualization techniques that aim to facilitate program comprehension. One of the main concerns in every such software visualization is to identify relevant aspects fast and provide information in an effective way. In previous work, we developed a cognitive visualization technique and tool called CocoViz that uses common place metaphors for an intuitive understanding of software structures and evolution. In this paper, we address software comprehension by a combination of visualization and audio. Evolution and structural aspects are annotated with different audio to represent concepts such as design erosion, code smells or evolution metrics. We use audio concepts such as loudness, sharpness, tone pitch, roughness or oscillation and map those to properties of classes and packages. As such we provide an audio annotation of software entities along their version history for software analysis and software browsing. Our first results with the prototype and a small user study show that with this combination of visual and aural means we can facilitate program comprehension and provide additional information that usually is not provided by current visualization approaches.