Towards the Visualization of Software Systems as 3D Forests: the CodeTrees Environment

We present an approach based on a forest metaphor to ease the comprehension of object oriented software systems. Software systems are represented as forests of trees that users can navigate and interact with. We also describe here the mapping of the information of the source code in meaningful ways to take advantages of familiar concepts such as agglomerates of trees (or sub-forest), trunk, branches, leaves, and color of the leaves. The approach has been implemented in a prototype of a 3D environment, namely CodeTrees. To assess the validity of the approach and environment, we have also conducted a preliminary empirical evaluation on three open source software systems implemented in the programming languages Java and C++.