Tag Clouds for Software Documents Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces JavaDocCloud, a tag cloud visualization method for software documents that displays tags based on frequency and importance, aiding developers in understanding document content.

Contribution

It presents a novel tag cloud visualization specifically for JavaDoc, highlighting important tags and applying it to a real software case study.

Findings

Identified most common and uncommon tags in JavaDoc documents.

Validated the visualization method with NanoXML case study.

Abstract

Legacy software documents are hard to understand and visualize. The tag cloud technique helps software developers to visualize the contents of software documents. A tag cloud is a well-known and simple visualization technique. This paper proposes a new method to visualize software documents, using a tag cloud. In this paper, tags visualize in the cloud based on their frequency in an alphabetical order. The most important tags are displayed with a larger font size. The originality of this method is that it visualizes the contents of JavaDoc as a tag cloud. To validate the JavaDocCloud method, it was applied to NanoXML case study, the results of these experiments display the most common and uncommon tags used in the software documents.