Glyph-based software component identification

Glyphs are automatically generated visual icons, commonly employed as an object identification technique. Although popular in the Human Computer Interaction community, glyphs are rarely employed to address software engineering problems. We extended the VisualID glyph technique to cope with structural software elements and used it to address two issues in software maintenance: identify classes with the same dependencies and classes with a similar set of methods. We have compared VisualID against three visual representations: textual, graph (nodes and edges), and dependency structural matrix. Our experiments indicate that VisualID significantly helps identify classes with the same dependencies and classes with similar methods when compared with visual techniques commonly used in software maintenance.