A Visualization Tool Recording Historical Data of Program Comprehension Tasks

• DOI

Abstract

Software visualization has become a major technique in program comprehension. Although many tools visualize the structure, behavior, and evolution of a program, they have no concern with how a tool user has understood it. Moreover, they miss the stuff the user has left through trial-and-error processes of his/her program comprehension task. This paper presents a source code visualization tool called CodeForest. It uses a forest metaphor to depict source code of Java programs. Each tree represents a class within the program and the collection of trees constitutes a three-dimensional forest. CodeForest helps a user to try a large number of combinations of mapping of software metrics on visual parameters. Moreover, it provides two new types of support: leaving notes that memorize the current understanding and insight along with visualized objects, and automatically recording a user's actions under understanding. The left notes and recorded actions might be used as historical data that would be hints accelerating the current comprehension task.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{maruyama-icpc2014,
    author = {Katsuhisa Maruyama and Takayuki Omori and Shinpei Hayashi},
    title = {A Visualization Tool Recording Historical Data of Program Comprehension Tasks},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension},
    pages = {207--211},
    doi = {10.1145/2597008.2597802},
    year = 2014,
}