The effect of 3D visualization on mainframe application maintenance: A controlled experiment

Abstract

Code written in 1960’s and 80’s are still being maintained by large software organizations. Such legacy systems play a significant role in supporting various data immense applications in banking, manufacturing, retail marketing, health care domains etc. The software maintenance engineer for such large systems has to undergo not trivial tasks of identifying and understanding relevant parts of system related to the developer/maintainer goals. As these systems were written before the evolution of software engineering principles, there is no standard documentation available for such systems and even best coding practices were not followed during the development of these systems. Hence, maintenance of such systems is a challenging task for young software engineers who need to spend a lot of time in comprehending the system before fixing the errors. The lack of tools that support legacy code comprehension makes the maintenance process to be time consuming and tedious. Our research is focused on understanding the impact of 3D software visualization for change impact analysis tasks on the mainframe during the maintenance phase. To conduct this research we have constructed a 3D visualization tool which generates a three dimensional call graph for a system written in COBOL using non immersive virtual reality (VRML). We have conducted a controlled experiment to test the effectiveness of the tool on subjects performing change impact analysis tasks. Our results show that subjects who used the tool performed more the tasks more accurately and faster than the group that did not use the tool.