The Paradox of Software Visualization Retrospective

Software visualization seems like such a logical and helpful concept with obvious benefits and advantages. But after decades of research and work, it has yet to be suc- cessful in any mainstream development environment. What is the reason for this paradox? Will software visualization ever be actually widely used? In this paper we argue that most past and current work in the field (our own included) is out of touch with the reality of software development and that new approaches and new ideas are needed.

This paper was originally presented in 2005. We show what has been done since has not significantly improved on the situation and leave it as a challenge to researchers in the field to address the underlying problems.