Immersive Environments for Visualizing Software Tradeoffs

Complex software is notoriously opaque. This opacity is costly for software engineers who must make pivotal design decisions without knowing the tradeoffs and consequences of those decisions. We propose a visualization tool that combines powerful document and software analysis techniques with rich three-dimensional visualizations. Deep static analysis augmented with information retrieval technology gives engineers access to the important dependences that crisscross software projects. A powerful visualization framework makes these dependences easier to explore. The resulting tool allows a user to start from a high-level system view and drill down to important details without losing context. Such an all-in-one view will make it easier for engineers to understand complex systems and make tradeoff decisions based on that understanding.