Towards Actionable Visualization for Software Developers

Abundant studies have shown that visualization is advantageous for software developers, yet adopting visualization during software development is not a common practice due to the large effort involved in finding an appropriate visualization. Developers require support to facilitate that task. Among 368 papers in SOFTVIS/VISSOFT venues, we identify 86 design study papers about the application of visualization to relieve concerns in software development. We extract from these studies the task, need, audience, data source, representation, medium and tool; and we characterize them according to the subject, process and problem domain. On the one hand, we support software developers to put visualization in action by mapping existing visualization techniques to particular needs from different perspectives. On the other hand, we highlight the problem domains that are overlooked in the field and need more support