Polymetric Views are visualizations of a graph enriched with metrics. Several polymetric views have been created to deal with specifics of data.

System Complexity View

System Complexity is a polymetric view that shows the classes of the system, organized in inheritance hierarchies. Each class is represented by a node:

• width = the number of attributes of the class
• height = the number of methods of the class
• color = the number of lines of code of the class

Class Blueprint

Class Blueprint is another polymetric view that shows the internals of a class. The class is split into 5 layers:

1. Initialization layer
2. Public interface layer
3. Private implementation layer
4. Accessor layer
5. Attribute layer

Furthermore, there are two types of edges:

• Invocations between methods (shown with blue)
• Accesses from methods to attributes (shown with cyan)

The picture below shows one example of a class that has a wide public interface and its internal implementation is split into several small methods that have a rather intricate call logic.

Class Blueprint can also be shown for hierarchies of classes. In the picture below we see such an example.

Selected publications

1. Stéphane Ducasse, Michele Lanza, and Roland Bertuli. High-Level Polymetric Views of Condensed Run-Time Information. In Proceedings of 8th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'04), p. 309—318, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos CA, 2004. DOI PDF →
2. Stéphane Ducasse and Michele Lanza. The Class Blueprint: Visually Supporting the Understanding of Classes. In Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) 31(1) p. 75—90, January 2005. DOI PDF →
3. Tudor Gîrba, Michele Lanza, and Stéphane Ducasse. Characterizing the Evolution of Class Hierarchies. In Proceedings of 9th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'05), p. 2—11, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos CA, 2005. DOI PDF →
4. Michele Lanza. Object-Oriented Reverse Engineering — Coarse-grained, Fine-grained, and Evolutionary Software Visualization. Ph.D. thesis, University of Bern, May 2003. PDF →
5. Michele Lanza and Stéphane Ducasse. Polymetric Views—A Lightweight Visual Approach to Reverse Engineering. In Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) 29(9) p. 782—795, September 2003. DOI PDF →