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Lowering Visual Clutter of Clusters in Component Diagrams

Authors:
Lukas Holy
Jaroslav Snajberk
Premek Brada

Keywords: software visualization; component; visual clutter

Abstract:
Nowadays, component applications can easily consist of hundreds or thousands of components and it is thus difficult to understand their structure. Diagram visualization does not help much because of visual clutter caused by big amount of elements and connections. This paper describes an approach of removing a large part of connections from the diagram while preserving the information about component interconnections. It also describes a viewport technique for showing all information about interfaces for selected group of components right in the diagram area. After that it presents novel integration of above mentioned techniques which maps a group of components to the content of a viewport. These techniques are among other benefits useful in the reverse engineering process. The main idea of this technique can be used in a similar way to reduce the clutter in the node-link graphs. To show the effect of this technique, example reduction of lines is discussed. So the better understanding of a diagram is also shown on preliminary results.

Pages: 304 to 307

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: November 18, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-230-1

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 18, 2012 to November 23, 2012