Reflections on Collaborative Software Visualization in Co-located Environments

Most software visualization systems and tools for maintenance are designed from a single-user perspective and are bound to the desktop and IDEs. These design decisions do not allow developers to analyze software collaboratively or to easily interact and navigate visualizations within a co-located environment. In my PhD thesis I conducted an exploratory study of how 44 pairs of professional software developers use Source is, a collaborative software visualization application, on a large multi-touch table in a co-located environment. The thesis contributes to a richer understanding of how pairs of developers collaborate with shared visualizations on large interactive tabletops to gain insight into the structure and evolution of software systems.