Developing and maintaining software is a difficult task, and finding effective methods of understanding software is more necessary now than ever with the last few decades seeing a dramatic climb in the scale of software. Appropriate visualisations may enable greater understanding of the datasets we deal with in software engineering. As an aid for sense-making, visualisation is widely used in daily life (through graphics such as weather maps and road signs), as well as in other research domains, and is thought to be exceedingly beneficial. Unfortunately, there has not been widespread use of the multitude of techniques which have proposed for the software engineering domain. Tag clouds are a simple, text-based visualisation commonly found on the internet. Typically, implementations of tag clouds have not included rich interactive features which are necessary for data exploration. In this thesis, I introduce design considerations and a task set for enabling interaction in a tag cloud visualisation system. These considerations are based on an analysis of challenges in visualising software engineering data, and the perceptive influences of visual properties available in tag clouds. The design and implementation of interactive system Taggle based on these considerations is also presented, along with its broad-based evaluation. Evaluation approaches were informed by a systematic mapping study of previous tag cloud evaluation, providing an overview of existing research in the domain. The design of Taggle was improved following a heuristic evaluation by domain experts. Subsequent evaluations were divided into two parts - experiments focused on the tag cloud visualisation technique itself, and a task-based approach focused on the whole interactive system. As evidenced in the series of evaluative studies, the enhanced tag cloud features incorporated into Taggle enabled faster visual search response time, and the system could be used with minimal training to discover relevant information about an unknown software engineering dataset.

Developing and maintaining software is a difficult task, and finding effective methods of understanding software is more necessary now than ever with the last few decades seeing a dramatic climb in the scale of software. Appropriate visualisations may enable greater understanding of the datasets we deal with in software engineering. As an aid for sense-making, visualisation is widely used in daily life (through graphics such as weather maps and road signs), as well as in other research domains, and is thought to be exceedingly beneficial. Unfortunately, there has not been widespread use of the multitude of techniques which have proposed for the software engineering domain. Tag clouds are a simple, text-based visualisation commonly found on the internet. Typically, implementations of tag clouds have not included rich interactive features which are necessary for data exploration. In this thesis, I introduce design considerations and a task set for enabling interaction in a tag cloud visualisation system. These considerations are based on an analysis of challenges in visualising software engineering data, and the perceptive influences of visual properties available in tag clouds. The design and implementation of interactive system Taggle based on these considerations is also presented, along with its broad-based evaluation. Evaluation approaches were informed by a systematic mapping study of previous tag cloud evaluation, providing an overview of existing research in the domain. The design of Taggle was improved following a heuristic evaluation by domain experts. Subsequent evaluations were divided into two parts - experiments focused on the tag cloud visualisation technique itself, and a task-based approach focused on the whole interactive system. As evidenced in the series of evaluative studies, the enhanced tag cloud features incorporated into Taggle enabled faster visual search response time, and the system could be used with minimal training to discover relevant information about an unknown software engineering dataset.

This thesis presents an in-depth investigation into the practical use of 3D for software visualisation. This work presents the first comprehensive user-centred study which examines the software engineering tasks users undertake currently, the issues that 3D addresses and a measure of benefit of the 3D solution compared to traditional approaches. This thesis also presents a mechanism for creating 3D software visualisations, a refined evaluation methodology and visualisation heuristics that together provide a valuable resource for further research into this area. The research results have been structured so they are directly applicable to industry and as such are already undergoing industrial adoption. This has been achieved through the following: Firstly the research augments current and accepted software visualisation approaches by basing the visual notation on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). This has enabled the current visual software engineering tasks to be studied and for representative user tasks to be captured and quantified. The 3D visualisations then complement the current working practices by solving

This thesis presents an in-depth investigation into the practical use of 3D for software visualisation. This work presents the first comprehensive user-centred study which examines the software engineering tasks users undertake currently, the issues that 3D addresses and a measure of benefit of the 3D solution compared to traditional approaches. This thesis also presents a mechanism for creating 3D software visualisations, a refined evaluation methodology and visualisation heuristics that together provide a valuable resource for further research into this area. The research results have been structured so they are directly applicable to industry and as such are already undergoing industrial adoption. This has been achieved through the following: Firstly the research augments current and accepted software visualisation approaches by basing the visual notation on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). This has enabled the current visual software engineering tasks to be studied and for representative user tasks to be captured and quantified. The 3D visualisations then complement the current working practices by solving

This thesis presents an in-depth investigation into the practical use of 3D for software visualisation. This work presents the first comprehensive user-centred study which examines the software engineering tasks users undertake currently, the issues that 3D addresses and a measure of benefit of the 3D solution compared to traditional approaches. This thesis also presents a mechanism for creating 3D software visualisations, a refined evaluation methodology and visualisation heuristics that together provide a valuable resource for further research into this area. The research results have been structured so they are directly applicable to industry and as such are already undergoing industrial adoption. This has been achieved through the following: Firstly the research augments current and accepted software visualisation approaches by basing the visual notation on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). This has enabled the current visual software engineering tasks to be studied and for representative user tasks to be captured and quantified. The 3D visualisations then complement the current working practices by solving

This thesis presents an in-depth investigation into the practical use of 3D for software visualisation. This work presents the first comprehensive user-centred study which examines the software engineering tasks users undertake currently, the issues that 3D addresses and a measure of benefit of the 3D solution compared to traditional approaches. This thesis also presents a mechanism for creating 3D software visualisations, a refined evaluation methodology and visualisation heuristics that together provide a valuable resource for further research into this area. The research results have been structured so they are directly applicable to industry and as such are already undergoing industrial adoption. This has been achieved through the following: Firstly the research augments current and accepted software visualisation approaches by basing the visual notation on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). This has enabled the current visual software engineering tasks to be studied and for representative user tasks to be captured and quantified. The 3D visualisations then complement the current working practices by solving

Software engineers need to understand the structure of the programs they construct. This task is made difficult by the intangible nature of software, and its complexity, size and changeability. Static analysis tools can help by extracting information from source code and conveying it to software engineers. However, the information provided by typical tools is limited, and some potentially rich veins of information - particularly metrics and visualisations - are under-utilised because developers cannot easily acquire or make use of the data. This thesis documents new tools and techniques for static analysis of software. It addresses the problem of generating parsers directly from standard grammars, thus avoiding the com-mon practice of customising grammars to comply with the limitations of a given parsing al-gorithm, typically LALR(1). This is achieved by a new parser generator that applies a range of bottom-up parsing algorithms to produce a hybrid parsing automaton. Consequently, we can generate more powerful deterministic parsers - up to and including LR(k) - without incurring the combinatorial explosion that makes canonical LR(k) parsers impractical. The range of practical parsers is further extended to include GLR, which was originally developed for natural language parsing but is shown here to also have advantages for static analysis of programming languages. This emphasis on conformance to standard grammars im-proves the rigour of static analysis tools and allows clearer definition and communication of derived information, such as metrics. Beneath the syntactic structure of software (exposed by parsing) lies the deeper semantic structure of declarations, scopes, classes, methods, inheritance, invocations, and so on. In this work, we present a new tool that performs semantic analysis on parse trees to produce a comprehensive semantic model suitable for processing by other static analysis tools. An XML pipeline approach is used to expose the syntactic and semantic models of the software and to derive metrics and visualisations. The approach is demonstrated producing several types of metrics and visualisations for real software, and the value of static analysis for informing software engineering decisions is shown.

La compréhension de la structure d’un logiciel est une première étape importante dans la résolution de tâches d’analyse et de maintenance sur celui-ci. En plus des liens définis par la hiérarchie, il existe un autre type de liens entre les éléments du logiciel que nous appelons liens d’adjacence. Une compréhension complète d’un logiciel doit donc tenir compte de tous ces types de liens. Les outils de visualisation sont en général efficaces pour aider un développeur dans sa compréhension d’un logiciel en lui présentant l’information sous forme claire et concise. Cependant, la visualisation simultanée des liens hiérarchiques et d’adjacence peut donner lieu à beaucoup d’encombrement visuel, rendant ainsi ces visualisations peu efficaces pour fournir de l’information utile sur ces liens. Nous proposons dans ce mémoire un outil de visualisation 3D qui permet de représenter à la fois la structure hiérarchique d’un logiciel et les liens d’adjacence existant entre ses éléments. Notre outil utilise trois types de placements différents pour représenter la hiérarchie. Chacun peut supporter l’affichage des liens d’adjacence de manière efficace. Pour représenter les liens d’adjacence, nous proposons une version 3D de la méthode des Hierarchical Edge Bundles. Nous utilisons également un algorithme métaheuristique pour améliorer le placement afin de réduire davantage l’encombrement visuel dans les liens d’adjacence. D’autre part, notre outil offre un ensemble de possibilités d’interaction permettant à un usager de naviguer à travers l’information offerte par notre visualisation. Nos contributions ont été évaluées avec succès sur des systèmes logiciels de grande taille. / Understanding the structure of software is an important first step in solving tasks of analysis and maintenance on it. However, in addition to the links defined by the hierarchy, there exists another type of links between elements of software that are called adjacency links. A complete understanding of software must take account of all these types of links. Visualization tools are generally effective in helping a developer in his understanding of software by presenting the information in a clear and concise manner. However, viewing these two types of links generate in general a lot of visual clutter, making these visualizations inefficient to provide useful information on these links. We propose in this M.Sc. thesis a 3D visualization tool that can represent both the hierarchical structure of an application and the adjacency relationships between its elements. Our tool uses three different types of layout to represent the hierarchy. Each layout can support efficiently the display of adjacency links. To represent adjacency links, we propose a 3D version of the Hierarchical Edge Bundles algorithm. We also use a metaheuristic algorithm to improve our layouts to further reduce visual clutter in the adjacency links. Moreover, our tool provides a set of interaction possibilities that allows a user to navigate through the information provided by our visualization. Our contributions have been evaluated successfully on large software systems.

La compréhension de la structure d’un logiciel est une première étape importante dans la résolution de tâches d’analyse et de maintenance sur celui-ci. En plus des liens définis par la hiérarchie, il existe un autre type de liens entre les éléments du logiciel que nous appelons liens d’adjacence. Une compréhension complète d’un logiciel doit donc tenir compte de tous ces types de liens. Les outils de visualisation sont en général efficaces pour aider un développeur dans sa compréhension d’un logiciel en lui présentant l’information sous forme claire et concise. Cependant, la visualisation simultanée des liens hiérarchiques et d’adjacence peut donner lieu à beaucoup d’encombrement visuel, rendant ainsi ces visualisations peu efficaces pour fournir de l’information utile sur ces liens. Nous proposons dans ce mémoire un outil de visualisation 3D qui permet de représenter à la fois la structure hiérarchique d’un logiciel et les liens d’adjacence existant entre ses éléments. Notre outil utilise trois types de placements différents pour représenter la hiérarchie. Chacun peut supporter l’affichage des liens d’adjacence de manière efficace. Pour représenter les liens d’adjacence, nous proposons une version 3D de la méthode des Hierarchical Edge Bundles. Nous utilisons également un algorithme métaheuristique pour améliorer le placement afin de réduire davantage l’encombrement visuel dans les liens d’adjacence. D’autre part, notre outil offre un ensemble de possibilités d’interaction permettant à un usager de naviguer à travers l’information offerte par notre visualisation. Nos contributions ont été évaluées avec succès sur des systèmes logiciels de grande taille. / Understanding the structure of software is an important first step in solving tasks of analysis and maintenance on it. However, in addition to the links defined by the hierarchy, there exists another type of links between elements of software that are called adjacency links. A complete understanding of software must take account of all these types of links. Visualization tools are generally effective in helping a developer in his understanding of software by presenting the information in a clear and concise manner. However, viewing these two types of links generate in general a lot of visual clutter, making these visualizations inefficient to provide useful information on these links. We propose in this M.Sc. thesis a 3D visualization tool that can represent both the hierarchical structure of an application and the adjacency relationships between its elements. Our tool uses three different types of layout to represent the hierarchy. Each layout can support efficiently the display of adjacency links. To represent adjacency links, we propose a 3D version of the Hierarchical Edge Bundles algorithm. We also use a metaheuristic algorithm to improve our layouts to further reduce visual clutter in the adjacency links. Moreover, our tool provides a set of interaction possibilities that allows a user to navigate through the information provided by our visualization. Our contributions have been evaluated successfully on large software systems.

<p>У докторској дисертацији презентовано је педагошко истраживање које се односи на увођење<br />математичког моделирања као савременог методичког приступа учењу математике, његову примену у<br />наставној пракси, као и на могућност да се кроз математичко моделирање проблема, појава и процеса који<br />се обрађују у неком другом наставном предмету оствари модернији, интердисциплинарни приступ<br />средњошколској настави. Све то у циљу афирмације иновативног, креативног и напредног математичког<br />мишљења, квалитетног, структуираног и функционалногзнања, које се у овом истраживању односи на<br />одређене наставне садржаје математичке анализе. У наставни процес интегрисан је осмишљен и израђен<br />пројекат чија је реализација омогућила успостављањемеђупредметне корелације, изучавање функција и<br />њихових примена у научним проблемима кроз процесе математичког моделирања. Нарочита пажња<br />посвећена је реализацији когнитивних активности ученика у свакој етапи процеса математичког<br />моделирања и остваривању њиховог вертикално-кумулативног поретка. Као посебна активност усмерена на<br />потребе и циљеве одабраних процеса математичког моделирања и усклађена са наставним садржајима<br />који су изучавани, уведен је и примењен нови методички приступ у обради функција датих помоћу<br />одређеног интеграла, са посебним акцентом на анализу логаритамске функције дате помоћу одређеног<br />интеграла, а затим и анализу експоненцијалне функције, као инверзне логаритамској. Један део<br />истраживања фокусиран је на увођење и реализацију назначене нове методичке концепције у обради<br />функција датих помоћу одређеног интеграла и на високошколском нивоу учења математичке анализе.<br />Испитивање ефикасности примењених нових, савременихметодичких приступа у раду са ученицима,<br />односно студентима, уз планску и систематску употребу рачунара са одговарајућом софтверском<br />подршком, обрађено је компаративном анализом резултата педагошких експеримената. На основу<br />резултата истраживања утврђен је позитиван утицај предложених методичких приступа на квалитет<br />математичког знања ученика, односно студената, и оствареност оптималних резултата у учењу и изучавању<br />наставних садржаја из области функције.</p> / <p>U doktorskoj disertaciji prezentovano je pedagoško istraživanje koje se odnosi na uvođenje<br />matematičkog modeliranja kao savremenog metodičkog pristupa učenju matematike, njegovu primenu u<br />nastavnoj praksi, kao i na mogućnost da se kroz matematičko modeliranje problema, pojava i procesa koji<br />se obrađuju u nekom drugom nastavnom predmetu ostvari moderniji, interdisciplinarni pristup<br />srednjoškolskoj nastavi. Sve to u cilju afirmacije inovativnog, kreativnog i naprednog matematičkog<br />mišljenja, kvalitetnog, struktuiranog i funkcionalnogznanja, koje se u ovom istraživanju odnosi na<br />određene nastavne sadržaje matematičke analize. U nastavni proces integrisan je osmišljen i izrađen<br />projekat čija je realizacija omogućila uspostavljanjemeđupredmetne korelacije, izučavanje funkcija i<br />njihovih primena u naučnim problemima kroz procese matematičkog modeliranja. Naročita pažnja<br />posvećena je realizaciji kognitivnih aktivnosti učenika u svakoj etapi procesa matematičkog<br />modeliranja i ostvarivanju njihovog vertikalno-kumulativnog poretka. Kao posebna aktivnost usmerena na<br />potrebe i ciljeve odabranih procesa matematičkog modeliranja i usklađena sa nastavnim sadržajima<br />koji su izučavani, uveden je i primenjen novi metodički pristup u obradi funkcija datih pomoću<br />određenog integrala, sa posebnim akcentom na analizu logaritamske funkcije date pomoću određenog<br />integrala, a zatim i analizu eksponencijalne funkcije, kao inverzne logaritamskoj. Jedan deo<br />istraživanja fokusiran je na uvođenje i realizaciju naznačene nove metodičke koncepcije u obradi<br />funkcija datih pomoću određenog integrala i na visokoškolskom nivou učenja matematičke analize.<br />Ispitivanje efikasnosti primenjenih novih, savremenihmetodičkih pristupa u radu sa učenicima,<br />odnosno studentima, uz plansku i sistematsku upotrebu računara sa odgovarajućom softverskom<br />podrškom, obrađeno je komparativnom analizom rezultata pedagoških eksperimenata. Na osnovu<br />rezultata istraživanja utvrđen je pozitivan uticaj predloženih metodičkih pristupa na kvalitet<br />matematičkog znanja učenika, odnosno studenata, i ostvarenost optimalnih rezultata u učenju i izučavanju<br />nastavnih sadržaja iz oblasti funkcije.</p> / <p>In this PhD dissertation pedagogical research related to introduction of mathematical modeling as a<br />modern methodical approach to learning mathematics is presented, its application in teaching practice,as well<br />as possibilities to achieve modern, interdisciplinary approach to high school teaching, using mathematical<br />modeling of problems, phenomenons and processes which are being looked at in another ciruculum subject. The<br />intention is to affirm innovative, creative and advanced mathematical thinking, high quality, structured and<br />functional knowledge, which in this study refers tospecific areas of mathematical analysis. A well thought<br />project was designed and constructed in such a way&nbsp; to integrate within the teaching process, and its<br />implementation has enabled the establishment of interdisciplinary correlation and the study of functions and<br />their use in scientific problems through the process of mathematical modelling. Special attention is paid to the<br />realization of cognitive activities of pupils in each stage of the process of mathematical modelling, and acheiving<br />their vertically-cumulative order. As a separate activity focused on the goals and needs of selected processes of<br />mathematical modeling, harmonized with teaching content being studied, a new methodical approach was<br />introduced and applied to treat functions given by&nbsp; a definite integral, with special emphasis on treatment of<br />logarithmic function given by a definite integral,&nbsp; and followed by treatment of the exponential function as the<br />inverse logarithmic. A part of the research is focused on the introduction and implementation of new methodical<br />concept in treatment of functions given by a definite integral and on university level of studying mathematical<br />analysis. Efficiency of these new and modern methodical approaches was tested on pupils and students,&nbsp; with<br />planned and systematic usage of computers and appropriate software, and processed by comparative analysis of<br />results obtained by pedagogical experiments. Results have shown positive impact of proposed methodical<br />approaches to the quality of pupils&rsquo; and students&rsquo;&nbsp; mathematical knowledge, and the achievement of optimal<br />results in learning and studying of teaching content on mathematical functions.</p>