Premium
Towards actionable visualization for software developers
Author(s) -
Merino Leonel,
Ghafari Mohammad,
Nierstrasz Oscar
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of software: evolution and process
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 2047-7481
pISSN - 2047-7473
DOI - 10.1002/smr.1923
Subject(s) - computer science , visualization , software visualization , software , domain (mathematical analysis) , task (project management) , human–computer interaction , process (computing) , information visualization , software development , field (mathematics) , software engineering , data visualization , data science , software construction , data mining , systems engineering , programming language , mathematical analysis , mathematics , pure mathematics , engineering
Abundant studies have shown that visualization is advantageous for software developers, yet adopting visualization during software development is not a common practice due to the large effort involved in finding an appropriate visualization. Developers require support to facilitate that task. Among 368 papers in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT venues, we identify 86 design study papers about the application of visualization to relieve concerns in software development. We extract from these studies the task, need, audience, data source, representation, medium, and tool, and we characterize them according to the subject, process, and problem domain. On the one hand, we support software developers to put visualization in action by mapping existing visualization techniques to particular needs from different perspectives. On the other hand, we highlight the problem domains that are overlooked in the field and need more support.