PerfVis: Pervasive Visualization in Immersive AugmentedReality for Performance Awareness
This addresses performance awareness for software developers, but it is incremental as it applies an existing visualization metaphor to a new context with early-stage feedback.
The paper tackles the problem of developers being unaware of performance impacts from code changes by proposing a city visualization in immersive augmented reality to provide pervasive, continuous performance awareness without disrupting workflow. The initial result indicates that this metaphor is adequate for analyzing dynamic performance data in large, non-trivial software systems.
Developers are usually unaware of the impact of code changes to the performance of software systems. Although developers can analyze the performance of a system by executing, for instance, a performance test to compare the performance of two consecutive versions of the system, changing from a programming task to a testing task would disrupt the development flow. In this paper, we propose the use of a city visualization that dynamically provides developers with a pervasive view of the continuous performance of a system. We use an immersive augmented reality device (Microsoft HoloLens) to display our visualization and extend the integrated development environment on a computer screen to use the physical space. We report on technical details of the design and implementation of our visualization tool, and discuss early feedback that we collected of its usability. Our investigation explores a new visual metaphor to support the exploration and analysis of possibly very large and multidimensional performance data. Our initial result indicates that the city metaphor can be adequate to analyze dynamic performance data on a large and non-trivial software system.