Interactive Software Maps for Web-Based Source Code Analysis

Software maps - linking rectangular 3D-Treemaps, software system structure, and performance indicators - are commonly used to support informed decision making in software-engineering processes. A key aspect for this decision making is that software maps provide the structural context required for correct interpretation of these performance indicators. In parallel, source code repositories and collaboration platforms are an integral part of today's software-engineering tool set, but cannot properly incorporate software maps since implementations are only available as stand-alone applications. Hence, software maps are 'disconnected' from the main body of this tool set, rendering their use and provisioning overly complicated, which is one of the main reasons against regular use. We thus present a web-based rendering system for software maps that achieves both fast client-side page load time and interactive frame rates even with large software maps. We significantly reduce page load time by efficiently encoding hierarchy and geometry data for the net transport. Apart from that, appropriate interaction, layouting, and labeling techniques as well as common image enhancements aid evaluation of project-related quality aspects. Metrics provisioning can further be implemented by predefined attribute mappings to simplify communication of project specific quality aspects. The system is integrated into dashboards to demonstrate how our web-based approach makes software maps more accessible to many different stakeholders in software-engineering projects.