The assurance of quality, reliability, and trustwor-thiness of software systems is a basic requirement in software development. Therefore, it is necessary to have a comprehension and detailed understanding of a software project. To make the understanding of a complex software system more accessible, a set of tools that analyze and visualize complex software systems could be introduced. Such a software analysis and visualization tool has to meet challenging requirements to be suited for the specific needs of users. To fulfill these requirements and to provide an intuitive way to understand the software projects with visual analysis, we use the human-oriented method of focus groups. We developed a design for focus groups to identify topics of interest regarding the analysis of software development processes. To test and improve our focus group design we conducted a pilot study with research software developers.

Software development is a complex process involving many people and development tools and their interactions; during development, a lot of data such as source code, documents, or software artifacts and information such as issues, discussions, or code analyses are generated or modified. In addition to the analysis and visualization of software systems, it is useful to analyze the software development process to obtain better information about the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of the software. To gain insights and knowledge about software development processes, we extract the provenance of development processes, especially from version control systems for Git-based software projects, and visualize the provenance information using graph visualization, metrics representation, and development timelines; including an integration of these methods into a web-based dashboard. With the help of visual provenance representations, project managers can gain an overview and insights into development progress, effects of process changes, and interactions among developers and with external contributors, which we exemplify with a case study of a software with high social relevance.

The use of static code analysis tools for security audits can be time consuming, as the many existing tools focus on different aspects and therefore development teams often use several of these tools to keep code quality high and prevent security issues. Displaying the results of multiple tools, such as code smells and security warnings, in a unified interface can help developers get a better overview and prioritize upcoming work. We present visualizations and a dashboard that interactively display results from static code analysis for “interesting” commits during development. With this, we aim to provide an effective visual analytics tool for code security analysis results.

The visualization of software architectures by the use of effective and feasible visual metaphors provides an intuitive approach to comprehend the implemented architecture of a software project. In this regard not only the visualization of the latest status of the implemented architecture is important, but also the visualization of the history of software architectures. Such visualizations show dependencies and contexts in which design decisions were made. Resulting information supports programmers to understand systems and to recognize disadvantageous design decisions. A software which is particularly suited for the visualization of component-based software is IslandViz. This software visualizes OSGi-based software architectures in Virtual Reality with an island metaphor, but at this point the history of an architecture is not taken into account. In this paper we present how IslandViz can be extended to visualize the history of software architectures of OSGi-based software projects. For this purpose we use algorithms for dynamic graphs to realize a dynamic positioning of the islands and an adaptable layout of the regions on the islands. The aim is to ensure that the user's orientation in the virtual environment is preserved even if elements of the visualization must adapt due to changes in the software history.