Software Visualization

Software visualization is the use of computer graphics and animation to help illustrate and present computer programs, processes, and algorithms. Software visualization systems can be used in teaching to help students understand how algorithms work, and they can be used in program development as a way to help programmers understand their code better.

Today's algorithm animation systems cannot deal well with the hierarchy problem. This sort of problem frequently occurs because animation viewers have different needs according to their intent. Software developers need to find errors in actual code and thus need to see the inner workings of their programs, while students in an algorithms class are more concerned with the abstract ideas behind an algorithm than with the actual implementation.

Support for hierarchies becomes essential for medium to large scale programs. Our idea is to use interactive specification techniques based on object-oriented principles to annotate programs according to their structure. Based on hierarchy information embedded in the program's structure, the viewer can decide at run-time which levels he is interested in. My own research focuses on the design and implementation of DynaStruct, a software architecture for making the construction of algorithm animations simple and fast.

Software Visualization Research on the Web

• Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center(GVC) at Georgia Tech
• Hypertext of JVLC "A Principled Taxonomy of Sofware Visualization" paper
• Algorithm Animation at DEC SRC
• Software Visualization at the University of Exeter
• Program Visualization at IBM TJ Watson
• Software Visualization at the Open University
• Pavane from Washington University in St. Louis.
• The Aims Project at NASA Ames is mainly concerned with the animation of parallel programs.

• Jörn Trilk's page on Software Visualization, and
• one by myself.

A Collection of Online Algorithm Animations

• Graham's Scan by Alejo Hausner.
• Bubblesort by Alejo Hausner. The animations are written in Java and run directly in the browser. No security problem here.
• Several sorting algorithms by Kenny Zalewski. It is an application of STL, the C++ Standard Template Library, and works by letting the user filling out a form. In turn, a window is opened at the user's host machine (security danger!). Unfortunately, I could never test this out, since the connection was very slow.
• The Worldwide Animation project. It is purely text-based and works by presenting the program as a text field in a form. The user may annotate breakpoints and set parameters. Every algorithm animation step results in an update of the form, indicating the status of the program.

Related Research Areas

• Scientific Visualization
• Visual Programming Languages and environments
• Information Visualization
• Graph Drawing