Visual Analytics in Software Maintenance: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Visual analytics (VA) is an emerging science at the crossroads of data and information visualization, graphics, data mining, and knowledge representation, with many successful applications in engineering, business and finance, security, geosciences, and e-governance and health. Tools using visualization, data mining, and data analysis are also prominently present in a different field: software maintenance. However, an integrated VA is relatively new for this field. In this paper, we discuss the specific challenges and particularities of applying VA in software engineering, highlight the added value of a VA approach, as distilled by us from several large-scale software engineering industrial projects.