Live Visualization of Dynamic Software Cities with Heat Map Overlays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a live, dynamic heat map overlay system for 3D software city visualizations, enabling real-time analysis of runtime behavior to improve program comprehension.

Contribution

It presents a novel live trace analysis method for dynamic heat map overlays integrated into a web-based visualization tool, enabling seamless, real-time insights.

Findings

Facilitates program comprehension through live heat maps

Automatically updates visualizations without manual intervention

Integrated into web and augmented reality environments

Abstract

The 3D city metaphor in software visualization is a well-explored rendering method. Numerous tools use their custom variation to visualize offline-analyzed data. Heat map overlays are one of these variants. They introduce a separate information layer in addition to the software city's own semantics. Results show that their usage facilitates program comprehension. In this paper, we present our heat map approach for the city metaphor visualization based on live trace analysis. In comparison to previous approaches, our implementation uses live dynamic analysis of a software system's runtime behavior. At any time, users can toggle the heat map feature and choose which runtime-dependent metric the heat map should visualize. Our approach continuously and automatically renders both software cities and heat maps. It does not require a manual or semi-automatic generation of heat maps and seamlessly blends into the overall software visualization. We implemented this approach in our web-based tool ExplorViz, such that the heat map overlay is also available in our augmented reality environment. ExplorViz is developed as open source software and is continuously published via Docker images. A live demo of ExplorViz is publicly available.