Towards Visualizing Code Annotations Distribution

Software visualization is being extensively investigated and successfully adopted to deal with existing software and to improve software comprehensibility [7, 8]. Lanza and Ducasse [6] proposed the polymetric view concept, which is a lightweight visualization of software entities enriched with software metrics. It allows the quick viewing of multiple software metrics values in a single entity. For instance, the measures of a displayed rectangle could be defined in terms of the LOC and number of methods in a class. In this paper, we propose a 2D polymetric view for the visualization of code annotations characteristics. The goal is to provide an intuitive way to visually extract information about annotations and metadata configuration in software projects. Packages and classes are represented as rectangles, while annotations as circles. Values such as area, radius, color, and position are defined by metrics values. We developed a prototype tool named Annotation Visualizer (AVisualizer), using the Unity Game Engine to implement our visualization design. To demonstrated it, we created a small sample project with seven classes and annotations from different frameworks. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the concepts of metadata in the context of object-oriented programming and how annotations are used. Section 3 presents the related work. Section 4 describes the suite of software metrics dedicated to code annotations. Section 5 describes our proposal for code annotations metrics visualization and how the tool was developed. Section 6 concludes the paper and presents future works.