@inproceedings{63abc7357b0046b496bb1d51abbe74f7,
title = "Comparing 2D and Augmented Reality Visualizations for Microservice System Understandability: A Controlled Experiment",
abstract = "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.",
keywords = "Augmented Reality, Controlled Experiment, Microservices, Service Dependency Graph, Visualization",
author = "Abdelfattah, \{Amr S.\} and Tomas Cerny and Davide Taibi and Sira Vegas",
note = "Funding Information: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1854049 and a grant from Red Hat Research, a grant from the Ulla Tuominen Foundation (Finland), a grant from the Academy of Finland (grant n. 349488 - MuFAno), and project PGC2018-097265-B-I00, funded by: FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Research State Agency. Funding Information: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1854049 and a grant from Red Hat Research, a grant from the Ulla Tuominen Foundation (Finland), a grant from the Academy of Finland (grant n. 349488 - MuFAno), and project PGC2018-097265-B-I00, funded by: FEDER/Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation—Research State Agency. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 IEEE.; IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension ; Conference date: 15-05-2023 Through 16-05-2023",
year = "2023",
doi = "10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00028",
language = "English",
series = "IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension",
publisher = "IEEE",
pages = "135--145",
booktitle = "Proceedings - 2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC 2023",
address = "United States",
}