Virtual 3D Worlds for Enhanced Software Visualization
Lachlan Keown
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury
Abstract
3D visualizations of software can be used to highlight relationships between system components, and also allow focussing on the internals of software, particularly when applied to object oriented software. Such visualizations allow software engineers to comprehend larger software systems, due to more information being available through the use of a third dimension. An architecture has been designed to carry out such visualizations. Major features of this architecture are a meta language to describe object oriented systems, a description language to generate generic visualizations, and an automated pipeline for generating visualizations. Using this architecture, several visualizations have been generated and analysed, to demonstrate advantages of this particular means of visualization.