A Tertiary Systematic Literature Review on Software Visualization

Abstract

Software visualization (SV) allows us to visualize different aspects and artifacts related to software, thus helping engineers understanding its underlying design and functionalities in a more efficient and faster way. In this paper, we conducted a tertiary systematic literature review to identify, classify, and evaluate the current state of the art on software visualization from 48 software visualization secondary studies, following three perspectives: publication trends, software visualization topics and techniques, and issues related to research field. Hence, we summarized the main findings among popular sub-fields of SV, identifying potential research directions and fifteen shared recommendations for developers, instructors and researchers. Our main findings are the lack of rigorous evaluation or theories support to assess SV tools effectiveness, the disconnection between tool design and their scope, and the dispersal of the research community.