Automatic extraction and visualization of object-oriented software design metrics

Software visualization is a graphical representation of software characteristics and behavior. Certain modes of software visualization can be useful in isolating problems and identifying unanticipated behavior. In this paper we present a new approach to aid understanding of object-oriented software through 3D visualization of software metrics that can be extracted from the design phase of software development. The focus of the paper is a metric extraction method and a new collection of glyphs for multi-dimensional metric visualization. Our approach utilizes the extensibility interface of a popular CASE tool to access and automatically extract the metrics from Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams. Following the extraction of the design metrics, 3D visualizations of these metrics are generated for each class in the design, utilizing intuitively meaningful 3D glyphs that are representative of the ensemble of metrics. Extraction and visualization of design metrics can aid software developers in the early study and understanding of design complexity.