In terms of software maintenance and comprehension, the fields of software engineering and software visualization have produced several methods and tools. However, they are typically separate tools in practice. In this paper, we present a novel methodology of combining software analysis and software visualization tools via an interactive visual workflow modeling approach. Standard software analysis tools are also limited in that they support only well-known metrics or are too complicated to use for generating custom software metrics. To address these shortcomings, our approach focuses on visual elements, their configurations, and interconnectivity rather than a data ontology and querying language. In order to test and validate our methodology, we developed a prototype tool called VIMETRIK (Visual Specification of Metrics). Our preliminary evaluation study illustrates the intuitiveness and ease-of-use of our approach with regard to understanding software measurement and analysis data.

One of the main challenges in the maintenance of large-scale software systems is to ascertain the underlying software structure and to analyze its evolution. In this paper we present a tool to assist software architects and developers in not only understanding the software structure of their system but more importantly to track the insertion, removal, or modification of components over time. The tool is based on the idea that the above-mentioned stakeholders should have an intuitive, efficient, and effective means to detect when, where, and what structural changes took place. The main components include an interactive visualization that provides an overview of these changes. The usefulness of this approach is highlighted through a summary of a user study we conducted.