Software visualization is as old as software engineering, but it still only has limited day-to-day applications. The potential benefit of visualization stays largely untapped, while the software community is facing a big problem: Professional software developers spend most of their development time on reading and understanding existing source code, instead of actually writing new one. Thus, a lot of their productivity is lost.
Visualization leverages research on human visual perception. Its use allows us to process and understand information much quicker than information provided solely in textual form. We will see how these laws are used by different software visualization fields to improve comprehension of certain aspects of a software system. Applying the introduced design principles we will develop a simple visual notation that helps to accelerate understanding source code. Sourcetrail, a cross-platform source explorer built on top of the LLVM/Clang LibTooling library, will be used to demonstrate how such a visual notation simplifies getting to know a large code base in practice.
