CocoViz: Towards Cognitive Software Visualizations

Understanding software projects is a complex task. There is an increasing need for visualizations that improve comprehensiveness of the evolution of a software system. This paper discusses our recent work in software visualization with respect to metaphors. Our goal is to use simple and well-known graphical elements known from daily life such as houses, spears, or tables to allow a user a quick and intuitive understanding of a given visualization via their proportions. We present a software metrics configurator that handle different metaphors and allows optimizations to their graphical representation. The results so far show that large systems can be visualized effectively with metaphor glyphs, yet more case studies and more metaphor glyphs are required for a better understanding for offering a simple and cognitive visual understanding of a software system.