The design of software systems is often so intricate that no individual can grasp the whole picture. Multi-Touch screen technology combined with 3D software visualization offers a way for software engineers to interact with a software system in an intuitive way. In this paper we present first results on how such emerging technologies can be used to explore software systems.

For ages we used our ears side by side with our ophthalmic stimuli to gather additional information, leading and supporting us in our visualization. Nowadays numerous software visualization techniques exist that aim to facilitate program comprehension. In this paper we discuss how we can support such software comprehension visualization with environmental audio and lead users to identify relevant aspects. We use cognitive visualization techniques and audio concepts described in our previous work to create an ambient audio software exploration (AASE) out of program entities (packages, classes ...) and their mapped properties. The concepts where implemented in a extended version of our tool called CocoViz. Our first results with the prototype shows that with this combination of visual and aural means we can provide additional information to lead users during program comprehension tasks.

Finding issues in software usually requires a series of comprehension tasks. After every task, an engineer explores the results and decides whether further tasks are required. Software comprehension therefore is a combination of tasks and a supported exploration of the results typically in an adequate visualization. In this paper, we describe how we simplify the combination of existing automated procedures to sequentially solve common software comprehension tasks. Beyond that we improve the understanding of the outcomes with interactive and explorative visualization concepts in a time efficient workflow. We validate the presented concept with basic comprehension tasks in an extended CocoViz tool implementation.

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.