Tag Clouds for Object-Oriented Source Code Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel tag cloud visualization method for object-oriented source code that uses all identifier names to help engineers understand and navigate complex software systems effectively.

Contribution

It presents an original approach to visualize source code as a tag cloud using all identifier names, validated through experiments on real software projects.

Findings

Successfully visualized code using identifier-based tag clouds

Validated approach on NanoXML and ArgoUML with accurate tag frequency detection

Enhanced software comprehension and browsing capabilities

Abstract

Software visualization helps software engineers to understand and manage the size and complexity of the object-oriented source code. The tag cloud is a simple and popular visualization technique. The main idea of the tag cloud is to represent tags according to their frequency in an alphabetical order where the most important tags are highlighted via a suitable font size. This paper proposes an original approach to visualize software code using a tag cloud. The approach exploits all software identifier names to visualize software code as a tag cloud. Experiments were conducted on several case studies. To validate the approach, it is applied on NanoXML and ArgoUML. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of the proposed approach as all tag names and their frequencies were correctly identified. The proposed tag cloud visualization technique is a helpful addition to the software visualization toolkit. The extracted tag cloud supports software engineers as they filter and browse data.