Comparing 2D and Augmented Reality Visualizations for Microservice System Understandability: A Controlled Experiment
Microservice-based systems are often complex to understand, especially when their sizes grow. Abstracted views help practitioners with the system understanding from a certain perspective. Recent advancement in interactive data visualization begs the question of whether established software engineering models to visualize system design remain the most suited approach for the service-oriented design of microservices. Our recent work proposed presenting a 3D visualization for microservices in augmented reality. This paper analyzes whether such an approach brings any benefits to practitioners when dealing with selected architectural questions related to system design quality. For this purpose, we conducted a controlled experiment involving 20 participants investigating their performance in identifying service dependency, service cardinality, and bottlenecks. Results show that the 3D enables novices to perform as well as experts in the detection of service dependencies, especially in large systems, while no differences are reported for the identification of service cardinality and bottlenecks. We recommend industry and researchers to further investigate AR for microservice architectural analysis, especially to ease the onboarding of new developers in microservice projects.
Mon 15 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
15:45 - 17:15 | Code Summarization and VisualizationReplications and Negative Results (RENE) / Discussion / Research at Meeting Room 106 Chair(s): Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla IIT Tirupati | ||
15:45 9mFull-paper | An Extensive Study of the Structure Features in Transformer-based Code Semantic Summarization Research Kang Yang , Xinjun Mao National University of Defense Technology, Shangwen Wang National University of Defense Technology, Yihao Qin National University of Defense Technology, Yao Lu National University of Defense Technology, Tanghaoran Zhang , Kamal Al-Sabahi University Of Technology and Applied Sciences-ibra Pre-print | ||
15:54 9mFull-paper | Label Smoothing Improves Neural Source Code Summarization Research Sakib Haque University of Notre Dame, Aakash Bansal University of Notre Dame, Collin McMillan University of Notre Dame Pre-print | ||
16:03 9mFull-paper | Interpretation-based Code Summarization Research Mingyang Geng National University of Defense Technology, Shangwen Wang National University of Defense Technology, Dezun Dong NUDT, Haotian Wang National University of Defense Technolog, Shaomeng Cao Peng Cheng Laboratory, Kechi Zhang Peking University, China, Zhi Jin Peking University Pre-print | ||
16:12 9mFull-paper | Naturalness in Source Code Summarization. How Significant is it? Replications and Negative Results (RENE) | ||
16:21 9mFull-paper | Comparing 2D and Augmented Reality Visualizations for Microservice System Understandability: A Controlled Experiment Research Amr Elsayed Baylor University, Tomas Cerny Baylor University, Davide Taibi Tampere University , Sira Vegas Universidad Politecnica de Madrid DOI Pre-print | ||
16:30 9mFull-paper | ChameleonIDE: Untangling Type Errors Through Interactive Visualization and Exploration Research Shuai Fu Monash University, Tim Dwyer Monash University, Peter J. Stuckey Monash University, Jackson Wain Monash University, Jesse Linossier Monash University Pre-print | ||
16:39 36mPanel | Discussion 4 Discussion | ||