Towards empirically validated software architecture visualization

Visualization is a sound means to facilitate understanding of software architectures, but the question is which visualization concepts should be selected to solve architectural tasks. In architecture visualization, there are almost no empirical evidences of the benefits of particular visualization concepts. That is why we introduce an approach that explicitly integrates architecture development, visualization and validation. We successfully applied this approach to realize our software architecture visualization tool and empirically validated the use of the visualization concepts in the software architecture domain. Therefore we claim that software architecture visualizations should always be thoroughly assessed, especially by software architects in an industrial environment