User-centered Software Visualization Design for Professional Developers

Software understanding is a critical activity for a wide range of stakeholders in software development. However, existing software visualization tools often lack an iterative user-centered design approach, resulting in solutions that do not fully meet the specific needs of target audiences. We describe a design iteration of the software visualization tool IslandViz targeted at professional software developers. We implemented a revised version of IslandViz based on insights from previous user evaluations and evaluated this version by conducting contextual interviews with experts who perform their regular coding tasks in their own software systems with and without IslandViz. From their qualitative feedback, we identified and implemented two key requirements for coding productivity, including performance improvements and a desktop-based presentation. We describe the resulting prototype and discuss lessons learned and future work.