Polymetric Views - A Lightweight Visual Approach to Reverse Engineering

By Michele Lanza, Stéphane Ducasse. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 2003

445 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reverse engineering software systems has become a major concern in software industry because of their sheer size and complexity. This problem needs to be tackled since the systems in question are of considerable worth to their owners and maintainers. In this article, we present the concept of a polymetric view, a lightweight software visualization technique enriched with software metrics information. Polymetric views help to understand the structure and detect problems of a software system in the initial phases of a reverse engineering process. We discuss the benefits and limits of several predefined polymetric views we have implemented in our tool CodeCrawler. Moreover, based on clusters of different polymetric views, we have developed a methodology which supports and guides a software engineer in the first phases of a reverse engineering of a large software system. We have refined this methodology by repeatedly applying it on industrial systems and illustrate it by applying a selection of polymetric views to a case study.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7454f744baaf8e08b33b8f63f6ca8488909e1eaf

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Citations in the corpus

Categories and Subject Descriptors (2001, background): “Polymetric Views are techniques that can visualize software metrics data [6].”
Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals (2018, methodology): “To reduce the effort due to navigating inheritance hierarchy, Lanza and Ducasse propose a lightweight view named polymetric views which is based on the combination of software visualization and software metrics [28].”
Software Architecture Reconstruction: A Process-Oriented Taxonomy (2009, methodology): “For example, CodeCrawler [92], Distribution Map [29], and Package Blueprints [30] present condensed views of software source code entities.”
Visualizing Software Systems as Cities (2007, background): “2D visualization has been extensively and successfully explored in the past [5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 19, 20, 22].”
Survey of Research on Software Clones (2006, methodology): “[67] propose to use Michele Lanza’s polymetric views [68] to visualize various aspects of clones in one view.”
The road ahead for Mining Software Repositories (2008, unknown): “Visualization techniques, such as [15, 38, 64] are essential”