Software map

A software map represents static, dynamic, and evolutionary information of software systems and their software development processes by means of 2D or 3D map-oriented information visualization. It constitutes a fundamental concept and tool in software visualization, software analytics, and software diagnosis. Its primary applications include risk analysis for and monitoring of code quality, team activity, or software development progress and, generally, improving effectiveness of software engineering with respect to all related artifacts, processes, and stakeholders throughout the software engineering process and software maintenance.

Software maps are applied in the context of software engineering: Complex, long-term software development projects are commonly faced by manifold difficulties such as the friction between completing system features and, at the same time, obtaining a high degree of code quality and software quality to ensure software maintenance of the system in the future. In particular, "Maintaining complex software systems tends to be costly because developers spend a significant part of their time with trying to understand the system’s structure and behavior." The key idea of software maps is to cope with that challenge and optimization problems by providing effective communication means to close the communication gap among the various stakeholders and information domains within software development projects and obtaining insights in the sense of information visualization.

Software maps take advantage of well-defined cartographic map techniques using the virtual 3D city model metaphor to express the underlying complex, abstract information space. The metaphor is required "since software has no physical shape, there is no natural mapping of software to a two-dimensional space". Software maps are non-spatial maps that have to convert the hierarchy data and its attributes into a spatial representation.

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