Program Visualization Support for Highly Iterative Development Environments

Abstract

Software Visualization is, despite the many publications and advances in this research field, still not being considered by mainstream software industry: currently very few integrated development environments offer (if at all) only limited visualization support, and in general it can be said that software visualization is being ignored at a professional level by the average software developer. Moreover, even relatively successful software visualization tools (such as Rigi, Shrimp, JInsight, etc.) are seldom being used except by their developers themselves. In this position paper, based on our own experience and an analysis of the current state and possible future trends of integrated development environments, we put up a non-exhaustive list of features that software visualization tools should possess in the future to have more consideration by mainstream development.