Service-oriented computing (SOC) has been widely used by software industry for building distributed software applications that can be run in heterogeneous environments. It has also been required that these applications should be both high-quality and adaptable to market changes. However, a major problem in this type of applications is its growth; as the size and complexity of applications increase, the probability of duplicity of code increases. This problem could have a negative impact on quality attributes, such as performance, maintenance and evolution, among others. This paper presents a web tool called VizSOC to assist software developers in detecting refactoring opportunities in service-oriented applications. The tool receives WSDL (Web Service Description Language) documents, detects anti-patterns and suggests how to resolve them, and delivers a list of refactoring suggestions to start working on the refactoring process. To visualize the results in an orderly and comprehensible way, we use the Hierarchical Edge Bundles (HEB) visualization technique. The experimentation of the tool has been supported using two real-life case-studies, where we measured the amount of anti-patterns detected and the performance of clustering algorithms by using internal validity criteria. The results indicate that VizSOC is an effective aid to detect refactoring opportunities, and also allows developers to reduce effort along the detection process.

Software visualization studies techniques and methods for graphically representing different aspects of software. Its main goal is to enhance, simplify and clarify the mental representation a software engineer has of a computer system. During many years, visualization in 2D space has been actively studied, but in the last decade, researchers have begun to explore new 3D representations for visualizing software. In this article, we present an overview of current research in the area, describing several major aspects like: visual representations, interaction issues, evaluation methods and development tools. We also perform a survey of some representative tools to support different tasks, i.e., software maintenance and comprehension, requirements validation and algorithm animation for educational purposes, among others. Finally, we conclude identifying future research directions.

The construction of information visualization systems is a difficult task. However, there is little research into the provision of software architectures for visualization systems to reduce this difficulty. Particularly, systems that provide a reusable support for the automatic management of the different levels of abstraction in which complex data can be observed cannot be found in current visualization systems. Telescope, an object-oriented architecture for visualization systems is presented. Its main goal is to provide a customizable infrastructure to develop visualization systems allowing the automatic management of the different levels of abstraction in which the visualized information can be observed. Telescope is based on the concept of abstractor objects which provides the generic behavior to support visualizations with semantic zoom capabilities controlled externally through abstraction scales. CityVis, a visualization system for city data, developed using the Telescope architecture, is also described.