An Architecture to Support Model Driven Software Visualization

Program comprehension tools are a valuable resource for navigating and understanding large software systems. Package explorers, fan-in/fan-out views, dependency graphs and coverage analysis are example contributions from the program comprehension community. While many of these research projects have lead to exciting enhancements in our field, many other projects have failed to be adopted because of poor interface design or lack of integration with existing tools. Designing, building, integrating and evaluating interfaces is a challenge to software engineering researchers. In this paper we borrow from the field of model driven engineering (MDE) to assist with the creation of highly customizable interfaces for software visualization. MDE moves the level of abstraction from implementation to design, and help improve the efficiency of building software visualizations. By moving away from implementation details, and providing researchers with the ability to customize their visualizations in an efficient manner, software engineers have more resources to design and evaluate their ideas