The Recursive Disk (RD) metaphor is a glyph-based approach for software visualization. In this case a glyph is a graphical entity with components, each of which has geometric and appearance attributes. Due to the simple visual appearance of this metaphor it is easy for stakeholders to get a good understanding of the different metaphor entities. Packages are represented by grey disks, which can contain inner packages as well. Classes are visualized by purple disks and can contain methods and attributes.
The city metaphor is a 3 dimensional real-world metaphor, aimed at creating a better understanding of the visualized system through a natural environment. The packages of an analysed system are represented by districts, its classes by Buildings. Methods and Attributes as well as different metrics of this metaphor differ depending on the chosen version which can either be original, panels, bricks or floors.
The dashboard supports project leaders and software architects in decision-making. It provides interactive views concerning architecture and dependencies as well as resource, risk, and quality management. Therefore, jQAssistant plugins scan software artifacts' data such as bytecode, Git logs, test coverage results and static code analysis results. The extracted data is stored as graphs in a Neo4j database. The query language Cypher, React, and D3 are used to create the various visualizations.
The evaluation server supports the researcher in conducting empirical evaluations. An experiment consists of different scenes, e.g., visualizations, tasks, and questionnaires. The whole evaluation can be done in the evaluation server, so switching tabs to other services such as Google Forms is superfluous. Furthermore, all user activities are logged with timestamp and it is possible to assign tasks randomly.