SoftCloud: A Tool for Visualizing Software Artifacts as Tag Clouds

Abstract: Software artifacts visualization helps software developers to manage the size and complexity of the software system. The tag cloud technique visualizes tags within the cloud according to their frequencies in software artifacts. A font size of the tag within the cloud indicates its frequency within a software artifact, while the color of a tag within the cloud uses just for aesthetic purposes. This paper suggests a new approach (SoftCloud) to visualize software artifacts as a tag cloud. The originality of SoftCloud is visualizing all the artifacts available to the software program as a tag cloud. Experiments have conducted on different software artifacts to validate SoftCloud and demonstrate its strengths. The results showed the ability of SoftCloud to correctly retrieve all tags and their frequencies from available software artifacts.