Evolve : an extensible software visualization framework

Existing visualization tools typically do not provide a simple mechanism for adding new visualization techniques, and are often coupled with inflexible data input mechanisms. This thesis presents EVolve, a flexible and extensible framework for visualizing program characteristics and behaviour. The framework is flexible in the sense that it can visualize many kinds of data, and it is extensible in the sense that it is quite straightforward to add new kinds of visualizations.The overall architecture of the framework consists of the core EVolve platform that communicates with data sources via a well defined data protocol and which communicates with visualization methods via a visualization protocol.Given a data source, an end user can use EVolve as a stand-alone tool by interactively creating, configuring and modifying one or more visualizations. A variety of visualizations are provided in the standard EVolve visualization library. EVolve can also be used to build custom visualizers by-implementing new data sources and/or new kinds of visualizations.The thesis presents an overview of the framework, its data protocol and visualization protocol, and a detailed case study showing how to extend EVolve