Software systems as archipelagos of atolls

We present a new metaphor that takes advantages of concepts such as archipelagos, atolls, and palms. Each package of a software system is represented as an atoll that maintainers can navigate and interact with. Atolls that form an archipelago represent the entire system. Maintainers can pass from an atoll to another one, so understanding how the entire software and its packages are related with one another. Palms on an atoll graphically depict salient information of the classes contained in the package associated to that atoll. The metaphor has been implemented as a 3D interactive environment tool to allow a fine- and large-grained understanding of a subject software system implemented in Java. Finally, we have used our 3D environment on a number of open-source object-oriented software systems and the obtained results are preliminarily presented in this paper.