VISSOFT 2013 - 8th IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT)

Software visualization is a broad research area encompassing techniques that assist in a broad range of software engineering activities, such as specification, design, programming, testing, maintenance, reverse engineering and reengineering.
In this workshop, we focus on visualization techniques that draw on aspects of software maintenance and evolution, program comprehension, reverse engineering, and reengineering, i.e., how visualization helps programmers to understand, analyze, and evolve software.
This event will gather tool developers, users and researchers in a unique format to learn about, experience and discuss techniques for visualizing software for understanding and analysis.
Software is inherently complex due to the number of artifacts in any system and their relationships. It is also unique in that it has both a static and a dynamic nature. This can affect the views that are applicable and useful, and even what constitutes a sufficiently complete view to support a comprehension task. There is a need to help support the program comprehension notion of discovering what a system does as well as how it does it. The goals of the workshop are to work towards being able to answer the question of what is a good representation for a given situation, data availability and required tasks. We will also consider the unique demands that software places on visualizations that other knowledge representations may not have to consider.
The workshop invites submissions focusing on (but not limited to) the following areas of interest:
visualization of source code
visualization of software architecture
dynamic program behavior visualization
visualization of parallel and distributed programs
visualizing web services
visualization of software repositories
visualization in reengineering and quality assessment
visualization of human activities in software development
empirical evaluation of the use of visualization in software engineering
integration of visualization tools in the software engineering tool chain
layout algorithms for diagramming
We invite submissions as full papers (8 pages in IEEE proceedings format), short papers (4 pages in IEEE proceedings format), and tool demos (4 pages in IEEE proceedings format). Papers accepted to the workshop will be included in a proceedings published by IEEE