On Visual Assessment of Software Quality

Development and maintenance of understandable and modifiable software is very challenging. Good system design and implementation requires strict discipline. The architecture of a project can sometimes be exceptionally difficult to grasp by developers. A project’s documentation gets outdated in a matter of days. These problems can be addressed using software analysis and visualization tools. Incorporating such tools into the process of continuous integration provides a constant up-to-date view of the project as a whole and helps keeping track of what is going on in the project. In this article we describe an innovative method of software analysis and visualization using graph-based approach. The benefits of this approach are shown through experimental evaluation in visual assessment of software quality using a proof-of-concept implementation — the Magnify tool.