SeeSys: Space-Filling Software
Visualization
Marla J. Baker
Stephen G. Eick
AT&T Bell Labs
Description of the paper
•A concrete application of TreeMaps
•Influenced by Dynamic Queries as well
•Provides a high-level visualization of a large-scale
software engineering project
•A fast way of getting an overview from a CVS
repository?
•In other words: CVS for management
•This is a “real-world” application!
What questions do we want to
answer visually?
1. Which subsystems are the largest? Where is new
development activity?
2. Where are the large directories? How are the
directories changing?
3. What proportion of work on a subsystem relates to
fixing bugs as opposed to adding new functionality?
4. What components are candidates for code restructuring,
based on their histories of required bug fixes?
5. How are the subsystems changing between releases?
What assumptions must we make
about the information to be
visualized?
The Data must be:
•Quantitative Why? So we can easily compare
different elements and display them with graphs.
•Additive. Why? So we can break a whole up into
parts, and know that the sum of these parts will
reproduce the whole.
TreeMaps seem to require these two notions.
Any hidden assumptions?
Yes! We’re also assuming that these types of
metrics are easily kept by every programmer on
the project, and feasibly attainable to SeeSys.
Basically, we assume that something like CVS is
running underneath SeeSys.
Is this a valid assumption? Of course! But I
wanted to make this explicit.
What can we measure about our
target system?
•Non-comment source lines (NCSL)
•Software complexity metrics
•How do we get these?
•Number and scope of modifications
•Number of programmers making modifications
•Number and type of bugs (a subcategory of
modifications)
1) Subsystem Information
Question: Which subsystems are largest?
•Check the area of a bounding box
•Check the color (redundant coloring)
Question: Where is new development taking
place?
•Check the gray-fill area of a bounding box
•It is perpendicular to the division of the
bounding boxes
Subsystem Information cont’d
2) Directory Information
Question: Where are the large directories?
•Find the thickest slices of a subsystem’s
bounding box
•They are parallel to the division of the
subsystems
•Larger slices are brighter in hue
•Newly added code is grey filled
Directory Information cont’d
Directory Information cont’d:
Zoom In
3) Error-Prone Code
Question: Which subsystems and directories have
the most bugs?
•No more redundant coloring (why?)
•Area of each subsystem represents new NCLS
•Area of grey-fill is NCSL dedicated to bug
fixes
•Blue spikes represent “directory bug fixing
NCSL detail”
Error-Prone Code cont’d
4) Recurring Problems
Question: What subsystems would make good
candidates for code restructuring?
•Area of each subsystem represents number of bugs
•Grey-fill area represents fix-on-fix bugs
•Blue spikes again represent directory detail
•Why can’t I zoom in here! Ahh!
Recurring Problems cont’d
5) System Evolution
Question: How have subsystems changed between
versions?
•Area of rectangle represents largest size ever
•Colored fill area represents size under current
version
• Can animate from one version to subsequent
versions to get a picture over time
•Could this be improved?
System Evolution cont’d
System Evolution cont’d
System Evolution cont’d
Favorite Sentence
“When applied to production-sized systems, routines for
producing flow-charts, function call-graphs, and structure
diagrams often break because the display is too
complicated. Or they produce displays that contain too
much information and are illegible.”
I translate this to read:
Unlike the other tools I’ve cited, which are all nice little
toys if you’re locked away in your ivory tower, this is not
a toy application! This is a real-world application!
Contributions
•Concrete, useful, large-scale, real-world
application of TreeMaps
•Proof of concept that TreeMaps can handle
extremely large datasets in a sensible way.
•Showcases effective use of redundant coloring
•Highlights hierarchical zooming– from
subsystem, to directory, to file– between versions
Contributions cont’d
Still, much better than this:
Index: BundleDownloader.java
===================================================================
RCS file: /fs/savoir/pugh/p/cvs/java/daveho/cl/BundleDownloader.java,v
retrieving revision 1.11
diff -u -r1.11 BundleDownloader.java
--- BundleDownloader.java
2000/08/29 15:31:49
+++ BundleDownloader.java
2001/02/07 20:15:53
1.11
@@ -56,10 +56,11 @@
if ( tag == BundleProtocol.NOTFOUND ) {
String name = m_input.readUTF();
callback.notFound( name );
+
continue;
}
if ( tag != BundleProtocol.BUNDLE )
-
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid tag byte");
+
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid tag byte: " + tag);
int length = m_input.readInt();
Notes on the references
•Cites the TreeMaps paper (Johnson and
Schneiderman, 1991)
•Cites work on visualizing line-oriented data, such as
an idividual source file. This looks cool! But it’s not
relevant.
•Cites lots of other papers, too… But I think the
TreeMaps paper is the major influence on this work.
Critique - weaknesses
•I really want zoomed-in pictures of directories
with error-prone code and recurring problems!
•I’m not sure the techniques used to display errorprone code and recurring problems were all that
great anyway…
•The screenshots, even in the original paper, are
terrible.
•No measurements! I want to see “4 out of 5
middle managers prefer SeeSys to the leading
brand.”
Critique – strengths
• Short, simple, elegant paper
• Attacks a real problem
• Doesn’t try to do too much– SeeSys
provides high-level visualizations of large,
complex software systems. Nothing more.
What has happened to this topic?
My web search uncovered that:
•Google search reveals: SeeSys is someone’s domain
name, and it’s an obscure command in MatLab.
•This paper has been referenced 4 times, though 3 were
by the same paper which showed up in a couple of
places.
•I found that a couple software engineering classes
study this tool.
•I was not able to uncover any commercial
organizations that use this particular tool, though I’m
not sure if that information is public anyway.
Conclusions
•Realistically, what else was left to do?
•SeeSys provides useful, general, effective high-level
visualizations of any quantitative, additive measurements.
•Further useful visualizations would likely be too specific
to a given system for this generalized framework
•Or would need to be done per line of source code. This
is a very different type of visualization problem for which
TreeMaps are probably not the best medium.
• More sophisticated Q&A measurements are more
difficult to obtain– at some point, software engineering
becomes an art
My main question: Has this been written in Java? Does
GNU have a free version? Can I build this type of TreeMap
interface on top of a CVS distribution, like jCVS?