Visualization of Object Oriented Software Measures using Self-Organizing Maps

摘要

Role of self-organizing maps in visualization and analysis of software measures is presented and discussed in this paper. We reveal how self-organizing maps can create a user-friendly and interactive visualization tool that helps software designer to inspect various alternatives and get a thorough insight into the structure of the clusters of the software modules and related metrics. We show how using self-organizing maps we can grow clusters in a dynamic fashion thus explicitly capture relationships between the software measures and quantify these dependencies for larger and less homogeneous clusters of software modules. The experimental environment exploited in this study relies on software measures coming from 10 large public domain systems, 5 Java and 5 C++ systems.