Immersive Software Archaeology – Guided Exploration of Legacy Systems in 3D Virtual Reality

Despite best software engineering efforts, many software systems turn into legacy over time. Even though in active use, design knowledge is lost and updates to satisfy current requirements become virtually impossible.
Software archaeology attempts to regain knowledge on legacy systems’ structure and behavior to prevent their impeding obsolescence. Yet, existing methods are not able to cope with the vast code size to explore and comprehend. Immersive virtual reality has great potential to aid comprehension if applied to software visualization. The project ISA exploits 3D virtual reality for software archaeology via interactive exploration in synchronized visualizations. To conquer the vast space of a system’s structure, we apply software clustering techniques to suggest meaningful structures to explore, enabling teams of engineers to collaboratively regain knowledge on a system's inner workings.