Software visualization and Yosemite National Park

As software systems grow in size and complexity, so does the difficulty of understanding and maintaining them. Research in software understanding attempts to mitigate this problem by making various aspects of software development more visible, accessible, and comprehensible. The authors propose a hypertext-based approach to software visualization in which navigation in software-space is modeled after physical navigation in Yosemite National Park. Physical navigation capabilities are mapped into the domain of software development, where a user of a software-project visualization system navigates among interrelated units of information. They use the metaphor to define a set of requirements for the visualization system. They define linguistic constructs for a navigation language to be used in software-world. They discuss practical implications of implementing the visualization system