Reproduction package for the paper - Are Software Visualization Tools Actually Usable, or Just a Graveyard of Good Ideas? A Systematic Review and Replicability Assessment

This repository contains the official replication package associated with the systematic literature review and replicability assessment of software visualization tools. The primary objective is to evaluate the evolution, utility, and actual availability of the field's output by analyzing a curated corpus of 531 papers published at the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS, 2003–2010) and the IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT, 2002–2025).

To address the persistent replicability gap within the community, this package provides the complete data pipelines, text-cleaning workflows, and manual classification matrices used to map the literature across a multi-dimensional taxonomy (covering purpose, technique, data type, and target users). The included datasets and scripts reproduce the quantitative foundation of our proposed problem-to-visualization decision framework, enabling the verification of historical trends—such as the growth in Debugging and Software Evolution research—and supporting the future development of structured visualization recommendation systems.

Note on data availability: Due to copyright restrictions, raw publication PDFs are omitted. All annotated classification matrices (main_manual_classification.csv), per-paper metadata summaries (papers_summary.json), extracted tool maintenance metrics, and processing scripts are provided in full to guarantee total computational reproducibility.