Using Augmented Reality for Visualizing Architectures of Software Modules

Abstract

Nowadays the technology of augmented reality has become available for a wide audience of users because of a big number of software and hardware enhancements and optimizations done in the last years. The fact that the smartphone is a suitable and relatively cheap device having all the hardware required makes the technology even more accessible and thus widespread. Furthermore, the interaction with three-dimensional objects in space may have positive impact on user’s perception of information. These both facts make the technology of augmented reality a good choice for displaying complex data.The analysis of software plays a significant role in development as it is vital to keep the code clean and sustained all the time. Poor quality code may be unsustainable to the extent it must be fully replaced which results in big losses of resources. In terms of quality checks the analysis must be informative and consume as few resources as possible to be executed so that it is appropriate to perform it regularly. That is the reason for this process to be automated and made convenient to execute and percept.The new system for automatic software analysis is described in this article. ADAR (Architecture Displayer in Augmented Reality) software is best suitable for code coupling and cohesion analysis as it uses three-dimensional graph to display connectivity between parts of software module. High coupling and low cohesion might inform the developers of severe architectural mistakes that may lead to high code fragility. With the use of AR technology the result of high coupling detection analysis in the form of graph is presented in augmented reality to provide user the information in a highly intuitive way.This article also covers different approaches to graph visualization in three-dimensional space. The criteria that allow to achieve high level of aesthetics relative to this problem are stated in paper. The problem of using the force-directed algorithms in terms of high-aesthetic graph visualization is described in details and some arguments pro their usage are given.