Synchrovis: 3D visualization of monitoring traces in the city metaphor for analyzing concurrency

Abstract

The increasing code complexity in modern software systems exceeds the capabilities of most software engineers to understand the system's behavior by just looking at its program code. The addition of concurrency issues through the advent of multi-core processors in the consumer market further escalates this complexity. A solution to these problems is visualizing a model of the system to ease program comprehension. Especially for the comprehension of concurrency issues, static information is often not sufficient. For this purpose, profiling and monitoring can provide additional information on the actual behavior of a system. An established visualization approach is the 3D city metaphor. It utilizes the familiarity with navigating a city to improve program comprehension. In this paper, we present our trace-based SynchroVis 3D visualization approach for concurrency. It employs the city metaphor to visualize both static and dynamic properties of software systems with a focus on illustrating the concurrent behavior. To evaluate our approach, we provide an open source implementation of our concepts and present an exemplary dining philosophers scenario showing its feasibility.