Tailored software visualization
Context
Interactive software visualization supports software developers to perform development and maintenance tasks. Classically, each visualization tool is designed in isolation without a focus on a specific family of tasks, leading to a situation where a developer faces as many tools as existing visualization metaphors. In addition, if the choice available to the developer is at the tool level, the actual problem faced by the developer is at the intention level. Instead of choosing a tool and be captive of such a choice, we envision a world where developers could use tailored tools that assemble all the visualization features needed for their very purpose, improving their efficiency. We propose to leverage the results obtained at UdeM with respect to software visualization and explore how the VERSO visualization tool suite can be used as a baseline to support this study. The project will rely on product-line modelling to reengineer a visualization product family from different versions of VERSO, and on the software composition paradigm to support the envisioned tailoring process (expertise from UQAM).
PhD Research Proposal
This PhD project aims to tackle the three following challenges:
- What are the abstractions required to model the interactive visualization features and activities?
- How to reverse-engineer an existing set of visualization products to extract the software assets related to these abstractions?
- How to support visualization configuration driven by the visualization needs instead of the technical assets to be composed together.
Contact
Please contact us (sahraouh@iro.umontreal.ca, mosser.sebastien@uqam.ca) by email to start discussions.
References
Supervision
Sébastien Mosser
Professor, UQAM