Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization

Welcome to SOFTVIS 2010, the 5th ACM Symposium on Software Visualization. This symposium focuses specifically on visualization techniques that draw on aspects of software maintenance, software evolution, program comprehension, reverse engineering, and reengineering. The high-level research question is "How can visualization help software engineers to efficiently and effectively develop and maintain large-scale, complex software systems? " We are very pleased to be part of VisWeek held from October 24th to 29th 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. VisWeek is the premier forum for visualization advances for academia, government, and industry, and brings together the world's top researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in tools, techniques, and technology. VisWeek traditionally combines three main conferences: IEEE Visualization, IEEE Information Visualization, and IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), along with a broad collection of workshops, tutorials, panels, demonstrations, posters, and exhibitions. We are proud that in addition to our traditional sponsorship from ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, and SIGSOFT, and our cooperation with ACM SIGCSE, we are this year also technically co-sponsored by the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization & Graphics (VGTC). The co-location with VisWeek, involvement of both ACM and IEEE, and single registration model of VisWeek, will ensure a dynamic flow of participants and information between all events. We are confident that this setup will strengthen the interactions between software visualization and other related visualization areas. Traditional SOFTVIS attendees will have the chance to get in touch with the latest developments in information visualization and visual analytics. Information visualization and visual analytics researchers will get in touch with the latest advances and challenges in software visualization. We believe that our co-location will lead to new and promising cross-disciplinary developments, mutually beneficial for all researchers and practitioners who use visualization to analyze and understand large, complex, time-dependent datasets and problems. We are pleased to announce invited talks by two high-profile researchers at the crossroads of software engineering and software visualization: Arie van Deursen will deliver our keynote presentation and Grady Booch will deliver our capstone presentation. As part of VisWeek, we will share joint coffee breaks with the other events as well as joint poster presentations. We will also have a demo session in which live demonstrations of software visualization tools will be presented. This year there were 55 technical papers submitted. Technical papers were reviewed by at least three members of the international program committee. The program committee accepted twenty 10-page full papers, which yields a 36% acceptance rate. Additionally, we continued the poster and tool demo tracks established in previous editions of SOFTVIS. We accepted 9 posters and 3 tool demos for presentation as well as publication as two-page abstracts in the proceedings. As an innovation to the symposium, the chairs selected two papers from the highest rated papers, as determined by the reviewers, to receive an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award: (1) An Interactive Ambient Visualization for Code Smells, by Emerson Murphy-Hill and Andrew P. Black; and (2) Off-Screen Visualization Techniques for Class Diagrams by Mathias Frisch and Raimund Dachselt. The Distinguished Paper awards recognize these papers as examples of excellent work that will stimulate further discussion and innovation in the field.