Abstract
Software visualization helps software engineers to understand and manage the size and complexity of the object-oriented source code. The tag cloud is a simple and popular visualization technique. The main idea of the tag cloud is to represent tags according to their frequency in an alphabetical order where the most important tags are highlighted via a suitable font size. This paper proposes an original approach to visualize software code using a tag cloud. The approach exploits all software identifier names to visualize software code as a tag cloud. Experiments were conducted on several case studies. To validate the approach, it is applied on NanoXML and ArgoUML. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of the proposed approach as all tag names and their frequencies were correctly identified. The proposed tag cloud visualization technique is a helpful addition to the software visualization toolkit. The extracted tag cloud supports software engineers as they filter and browse data.
Highlights
Object-oriented (OO) source code visualization helps software engineers understand and manage the complexity and size of software code [1]
This paper proposes an original approach called Iconic to visualize OO software as a tag cloud [2]
If F-Measure equals to one, all relevant tag frequencies are retrieved, and only relevant tag frequencies are retrieved. This means that all frequencies that display the importance of tag names via font size are extracted
Summary
Object-oriented (OO) source code visualization helps software engineers understand and manage the complexity and size of software code [1]. A tag cloud is a visual representation of textual content that uses color and size to point out word frequency [3]. The current studies that identify tag clouds from software code exploit only software classes and methods [8,9,10,11]. In the cloud some tags may appear more important than others, where the tag frequency determines the tag font size. Based on static code analysis [12], Iconic extracts all software identifier names. It splits the identifier names into their constituent words.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
