Live Trace Visualization for System and Program Comprehension in Large Software Landscapes

The increasing code complexity in modern enterprise software systems exceeds the capabilities of most software engineers to understand the system's behavior by just looking at its program code.
Large software landscapes - often consisting of hundreds of applications - further increase this complexity.

In my talk, I will present our live visualization approach of monitoring traces for large software landscapes to tackle this challenge. Our approach, called ExplorViz, combines a landscape and an application-level perspective. The landscape-level perspective provides an overview of the software landscape. The application-level perspective provides a visualization utilizing the 3D city metaphor for each application. In addition, I will show two related techniques which are physical software models ("software to touch") and a virtual reality approach for exploring software cities. Furthermore, I will report on the conducted evaluations in the context of ExplorViz and our findings.

Florian Fittkau received the BSc and MSc degrees in computer science from the Kiel University, Germany, in 2010 and 2012, respectively, and is currently working toward the PhD degree. His research interests include software visualization, human-computer-interaction, cloud computing, and empirical methods.

Particularly, he is interested in live trace visualization of large software landscapes and efficient methods for processing and visualization of such monitoring traces. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.