Magnify - A new tool for software visualization

Modern software systems are inherently complex. Their maintenance is hardly possible without precise up-to-date documentation. It is often tricky to document dependencies among software components by only looking at the raw source code. We address these issues by researching new software analysis and visualization tools. In this paper we focus on software visualisation. Magnify is our new tool that performs static analysis and visualization of software. It parses the source code, identifies dependencies between code units and records all the collected information in a repository based on a language-independent graph-based data model. Nodes of the graph correspond to program entities of disparate granularity: methods, classes, packages etc. Edges represent dependencies and hierarchical structure. We use colours to reflect the quality, sizes to display the importance of artefacts, density of connections to portray the coupling. This kind of visualization gives bird's-eye view of the source code. It is always up to date, since the tool generates it automatically from the current revision of software. In this paper we discuss the design of the tool and present visualizations of sample open-source Java projects of various sizes.