How does 3-D visualization work in software engineering?: empirical study of a 3-D version/module visualization system

Version control and module management are very important in practical software development. In UNIX, RCS or SCCS is used in general as version control tools. They, however, have a couple of drawbacks. This paper proposed a solution for these issues by applying 3D visualization. The prototype system, VRCS, was developed. In our system, version information stored in the RCS history file is displayed as a 2D tree by taking the z-axis as time. Other 2D trees are laid out in 3D space in the same way. In our visualization, files which compose a certain release of the software are connected by a line called a relation link. By using GUIs, users can check in/out each version easily and interactively. More importantly, just by choosing the relation link, a certain release is rebuilt automatically. Three comparative experiments between VRCS and RCS were conducted to know the effectiveness of VRCS. The result shows that VRCS is faster in checking in/out than RCS