2025/09/27 by Anthony Savidis, Savidis, Anthony, Christos Vasilopoulos +1
Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Graphics (cs.GR) #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.23297
openalex publication_date 2025/09/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Software visualization seeks to represent software artifacts graphical-ly in two or three dimensions, with the goal of enhancing comprehension, anal-ysis, maintenance, and evolution of the source code. In this context, visualiza-tions employ graphical forms such as dependency structures, treemaps, or time-lines that incorporate repository histories. These visualizations allow software engineers to identify structural patterns, detect complexity hotspots, and infer system behaviors that are difficult to perceive directly from source text. By adopting metaphor-based approaches, visualization tools provide macroscopic overviews while enabling focused inspection of specific program elements, thus offering an accessible means of understanding large-scale systems. The contri-bution of our work lies in three areas. First, we introduce a configurable group-ing mechanism that supports flexible organization of code elements based on arbitrary relationships. Second, we combine fine-grained and coarse-grained software metrics to provide a multi-level perspective on system properties. Third, we present an interactive visualization engine that allows developers to dynamically adjust rendering attributes. Collectively, these advances provide a more adaptable and insightful approach to source code comprehension.