Towards More Flexibility in Software Visualization Tools

Software visualization has been researched for years, but current IDEs lack support for modern visualization techniques. It seems that the tools are either focused and not applicable to a broad range of tasks, or they are generic but do not provide good support for specific tasks. What is needed are tools that provide flexibility to customize the visualization technique, layout, and appearance, and enable users to aggregate and filter information based on various attributes. We make a case for a layered software visualization framework, which exposes such flexibility to the user. Having such a tool, developers are capable to customize visualization in an easy manner, so that it is most appropriate for their current task