Visualizing traceability links between source code and documentation

It is well recognized that visualizing traceability links between software artifacts helps developers to recover, browse, and maintain these inter-relationships effectively and efficiently. However, it is a major challenge for researchers to efficiently visualize traceability links for big software systems because of scalability and visual clutter issues. In this paper we present a new approach that combines treemap and hierarchical tree visualization techniques to provide a global structure of traces and a detailed overview of each trace. These both reduce visual clutter while still being highly scalable and interactive. Our usability study shows that our approach can support comprehension, browsing, and maintenance of traceability links.