Immersive Software Archaeology: Collaborative Exploration and Note Taking in Virtual Reality
Pages 387 - 391
Abstract
Understanding software systems is a vital task, often undertaken by teams of engineers, for the development and maintenance of systems. Collaborative software visualization tools are essential in this context, yet they are limited. Existing tools, particularly in virtual reality, allow exploration but lack the crucial feature of note-taking, which is a significant limitation.
We present Immersive Software Archaeology (ISA), a virtual reality tool that enables engineering teams to collaboratively explore and comprehend software systems. Unique to ISA, it facilitates notetaking during exploration with virtual multimedia whiteboards that support freehand diagramming, audio recordings, and VR screenshots. Notes taken on these whiteboards are synchronized with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), providing easy access to the results of a VR exploration while performing changes to the system's source code.
Video Demonstration---https://youtu.be/32EIpf4V3b4
References
[1]
G Ann Campbell. 2018. Cognitive complexity: An overview and evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2018 international conference on technical debt. 57--58.
[2]
Stephan Diehl. 2007. Software visualization: visualizing the structure, behaviour, and evolution of software. Springer Science & Business Media.
[3]
S. Ducasse and D. Pollet. 2009. Software Architecture Reconstruction: A Process-Oriented Taxonomy. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 35, 4 (July 2009), 573--591.
[4]
Florian Fittkau, Alexander Krause, and Wilhelm Hasselbring. 2015. Exploring software cities in virtual reality. In 2015 IEEE 3rd Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). IEEE, Bremen, Germany, 130--134.
[5]
Dussan Freire-Pozo, Kevin Cespedes-Arancibia, Leonel Merino, Alison Fernandez-Blanco, Andres Neyem, and Juan Pablo Sandoval Alcocer. 2023. DGT-AVisualizing Code Dependencies in AR. In 2023 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). IEEE.
[6]
Denis Gračanin, Krešimir Matković, and Mohamed Eltoweissy. 2005. Software visualization. Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering 1, 2 (Sept. 2005), 221--230.
[7]
O. Greevy, M. Lanza, and C. Wysseier. 2005. Visualizing Feature Interaction in 3-D. In 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis. IEEE, Budapest, Hungary, 1--6.
[8]
Adrian Hoff, Lea Gerling, and Christoph Seidl. 2022. Utilizing Software Architecture Recovery to Explore Large-Scale Software Systems in Virtual Reality. In 2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). IEEE, Limassol, Cyprus, 119--130.
[9]
Adrian Hoff, Michael Nieke, and Christoph Seidl. 2021. Towards immersive software archaeology: regaining legacy systems' design knowledge via interactive exploration in virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. ACM, Athens Greece, 1455--1458.
[10]
Adrian Hoff, Christoph Seidl, Mircea Lungu, and Michele Lanza. 2023. Preparing Software Re-Engineering via Freehand Sketches in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. IEEE. https://www.inf.usi.ch/lanza/Downloads/Hoff2023b.pdf
[11]
C. Knight and M. Munro. 2000. Virtual but visible software. In 2000 IEEE Conference on Information Visualization. An International Conference on Computer Visualization and Graphics. IEEE Comput. Soc, London, UK, 198--205.
[12]
Rainer Koschke and Marcel Steinbeck. 2021. SEE Your Clones With Your Teammates. In 2021 IEEE 15th International Workshop on Software Clones (IWSC). IEEE, Luxembourg, 15--21.
[13]
Alexander Krause-Glau, Marcel Bader, and Wilhelm Hasselbring. 2022. Collaborative Software Visualization for Program Comprehension. Pages: 86.
[14]
M. Lanza and S. Ducasse. 2003. Polymetric views - A lightweight visual approach to reverse engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 29, 9 (Sept. 2003), 782--795.
[15]
Mircea Lungu, Michele Lanza, and Oscar Nierstrasz. 2014. Evolutionary and collaborative software architecture recovery with Softwarenaut. Science of Computer Programming 79 (Jan. 2014), 204--223.
[16]
Leonel Merino, Mohammad Ghafari, Craig Anslow, and Oscar Nierstrasz. 2017. CityVR: Gameful Software Visualization. (2017), 5.
[17]
Roberto Minelli and Michele Lanza. 2013. SAMOA - A Visual Software Analytics Platform for Mobile Applications. In 2013 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. 476--479. ISSN: 1063-6773.
[18]
David Moreno-Lumbreras, Jesus M Gonzalez-Barahona, and Andrea Villaverde. 2021. BabiaXR: Virtual Reality software data visualizations for the Web. (2021).
[19]
Harry Sneed and Chris Verhoef. 2019. Re-implementing a legacy system. Journal of Systems and Software 155 (Sept. 2019), 162--184.
[20]
Frank Steinbrückner and Claus Lewerentz. 2013. Understanding software evolution with software cities. Information Visualization 12, 2 (April 2013), 200--216.
[21]
Richard Wettel and Michele Lanza. 2008. CodeCity: 3D visualization of large-scale software. In Companion of the 13th international conference on Software engineering - ICSE Companion '08. ACM Press, Leipzig, Germany, 921.
[22]
Richard Wettel, Michele Lanza, and Romain Robbes. 2011. Software systems as cities: a controlled experiment. In Proceeding of the 33rd international conference on Software engineering - ICSE '11. ACM Press, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA, 551.
[23]
Sandra Yin and Julia Mccreary. 1992. Myths and realities: Defining re-engineering for a large organization. In NASA. Goddard Space Flight Center, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Software Engineering Workshop.
[24]
P. Young and M. Munro. 1998. Visualising software in virtual reality. In Proceedings. 6th International Workshop on Program Comprehension. IWPC'98 (Cat. No.98TB100242). IEEE Comput. Soc, Ischia, Italy, 19--26.
Index Terms
- Immersive Software Archaeology: Collaborative Exploration and Note Taking in Virtual Reality
Recommendations
Collaborative Software Exploration with Multimedia Note Taking in Virtual Reality
ICPC '24: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program ComprehensionExploring and comprehending a software system, e.g., as preparation for its re-engineering, is a relevant, yet challenging endeavour often conducted by teams of engineers. Collaborative exploration tools aim to ease the process, e.g., via interactive ...
Towards immersive software archaeology: regaining legacy systems’ design knowledge via interactive exploration in virtual reality
ESEC/FSE 2021: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software EngineeringMany of today's software systems will become the legacy systems of tomorrow, comprised of outdated technology and inaccurate design documents. Preparing for their eventual re-engineering requires engineers to regain lost design knowledge and discover re-...
Collaborative program comprehension via software visualization in extended reality
Abstract Context:In software visualization research, various approaches strive to create immersive environments by employing extended reality devices. In that context, only few research has been conducted on the effect of ...
Highlights- Collaborative program comprehension via software visualization using (non)XR devices.
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
April 2024
487 pages
ISBN:9798400705861
DOI:10.1145/3643916
- Chair:
- Igor Steinmacher,
- Co-chair:
- Mario Linares-Vasquez,
- Program Chair:
- Kevin Patrick Moran,
- Program Co-chair:
- Olga Baysal
Copyright © 2024 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 13 June 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Funding Sources
- Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF)
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Conference
ICPC '24
Sponsor:
ICPC '24: 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension
April 15 - 16, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
Upcoming Conference
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 43Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)43
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)21
Reflects downloads up to 04 Sep 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in