Live trace visualization for comprehending large software landscapes: The ExplorViz approach

The increasing code complexity in modern enterprise software systems exceeds the capabilities of most software engineers to understand the system´s behavior by just looking at its program code. Large software landscapes, e.g., applications in a cloud infrastructure, further increase this complexity. A solution to these problems is visualizing the applications of the software landscape to ease program comprehension and to understand the respective communication. An established visualization concept is the 3D city metaphor. It utilizes the familiarity with navigating a city to improve program comprehension. Dynamic analysis, e.g., monitoring, can provide the required program traces of the communication. In this paper, we present our live visualization approach of monitoring traces for large software landscapes. It combines a landscape and a system level perspective. The landscape level perspective provides an overview of the software landscape utilizing the viewer´s familiarity with UML. The system level perspective provides a visualization utilizing the city metaphor for each software system.