Abstract
Today, many of the research innovations in software visualization and comprehension are evaluated on small-scale programs in a way that avoids actual human evaluation, despite the fact that these techniques are designed to help programmers develop and understand large and complex software. The investments required to perform such human studies often outweigh the need to publish. As such, the goal of this work (and toolkit) is to enable the evaluation of software visualizations of real-life software systems by its actual developers, as well as to understand the factors that influence adoption. The approach is to directly assist practicing software developers with visualizations through open and online collaboration tools. The mechanism by which we accomplish this goal is an online service that is linked through the projects’ revision-control and build systems. We are calling this system SPIDER SENSE, and it includes web-based visualizations for software exploration that is supported by tools for mirroring development activities, automatic building and testing, and automatic instrumentation to gather dynamic-analysis data. In the future, we envision the system and toolkit to become a framework on which further visualizations and analyses are developed. SPIDER SENSE is open-source and publicly available for download and collaborative development.
