Software Visualization

The use of the crafts of typography, praphic design, animation, and cinematography with modern human-computer interaction and computer graphics technology to facilitate both the human understanding and effective use of computer software.

- Price, Baecher and Small, '98

Software visualization is concerned with the static or animated 2-D or 3-D visual representeation of information about software systems based on their structure, history, or behavior.

Typically, the information used for visualization is software metric data from measurement activities or from reverse engineering. Visualization is inherently not a method for software quality assurance but can be used to manually discover anomalies similar to the process of visual data mining.

The objectvies of software visualizations are to support the understanding of software systems(i.e., its structure) and algorithms(e.g., by animating the behavior of sorting algorithms) as well as the analysis of software systems and their anomalies (e.g., by showing classes with high coupling).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_visualization