Visualizing software systems

There are many graphical techniques for visualizing software. Unfortunately, the current techniques do not scale to display large software systems and are largely unused. We present a method for visualizing statistics associated with code that is divided hierarchically into subsystems, directories, and files. Using this technique, we can display the relative sizes of the components in the system, which components are stable and which are changing, where the new functionality is being added, and identify error-prone code with many bug fixes. Using animation, we can display the historical evolution of the code.<
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