Software visual analytics
One definition of visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. Another definition is the combination of data analysis and information visualization techniques into integrated tools for problem solving. In the last few years, visual analytics has witnessed an increased growth as a separate discipline at the crossroads of data mining, data analysis, and InfoVis.
Software visual analytics
Software maintenance accounts for over 80% of the total costs of typical software product lifecycles. Of these, software understanding takes over 40%. Typical software understanding solutions consist of two main ingredients:
- software analysis, including data mining from repositories, static analysis, fact extraction, and metric computation
- software visualization of the structure, behavior, and evolution of systems
Given the above, it makes perfect sense to address software understanding as an instance of software visual analytics.
SolidSX: A software visual analytics toolkit
SolidSX is part of our joint work with the SolidSource start-up company in developing a generic, easy-to-use, and scalable toolset for software visual analytics. SolidSX offers the following features
- scalable static analysis for C, C++, C#, and Java
- structure, dependency, and quality metric computation
- multiple linked views including hierarchically bundled edges, treemaps, table lenses, and tree views
- black-box event-based integration with third party tools, e.g. Visual Studio
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Our software visual analytics toolset components are separately maintained and available free of charge for trial or research purposes here.