Interactive exploration of compacted visualizations for understanding behavior in complex software

ABSTRACT

In this demonstration we present Chrono, a tool that creates sequence diagram based visualizations. Since the diagrams produced by traditional sequence diagramming tools become large and unmanageable when dealing with complex code bases, Chrono focuses on removing less relevant information, condensing diagram components, and allowing for interactive exploration.

REFERENCES

• 1: Lapis. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/lapis/
• 2: Relo. http://relo.csail.mit.edu/
• 3: Vineet Sinha , Rob Miller , David Karger, Incremental exploratory visualization of relationships in large codebases for program comprehension, Companion to the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 16-20, 2005, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1094855.1094891]
• 4: Bennett, C., Myers, D., Storey, M., German, D. "Working with 'Monster' Traces: Building a Scalable, Usable Sequence Viewer", PCODA 2007.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: User interfaces

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Integrated environments; Interactive environments; Graphical environments

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management

Keywords:
complex software systems, diagram compression, exploration, interaction, reverse engineering, software behavior, software visualization