Thread City: Combined Visualization of Structure and Activity for the Exploration of Multi-threaded Software Systems

This paper presents a novel visualization technique for the interactive exploration of multi-threaded software systems. It combines the visualization of static system structure based on the Evo Streets approach with an additional traffic metaphor to communicate the runtime characteristics of multiple threads simultaneously. To improve visual scalability with respect to the visualization of complex software systems, we further present an effective level-of-detail visualization based on hierarchical aggregation of system components by taking viewing parameters into account. We demonstrate our technique by means of a prototypical implementation and compare our result with existing visualization techniques.