Live Software Development Environment for Java using Virtual Reality

Abstract

Any software system that has a considerable growing number of features will suffer from essential complexity, which makes the understanding of the software artifacts increasingly costly and time-consuming. A common approach for reducing the software understanding complexity is to use software visualizations techniques. There are already several approaches for visualizing software, as well as for extracting the information needed for those visualizations. This paper presents a novel approach to tackle the software complexity, delving into the common approaches for extracting information about software artifacts and common software visualization metaphors, allowing users to dive into the software system in a live way using virtual reality (VR). Experiments were carried out in order to validate the correct extraction of metadata from the software artifact and the corresponding VR visualization. With this work, we intend to present a starting point towards a Live Software Development approach.