Understanding code architectures via interactive exploration and layout of layered diagrams

ABSTRACT

Visualization tools that target helping developers understand software have typically had visual scalability limitations, requiring significant input before providing useful results. In contrast, we present Strata, which has been designed to actively help users by providing layered diagrams. The defaults used are based on the package structure, and user interactions can allow for overriding these defaults and focusing on relevant parts of the codebase.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ian Gorton , Liming Zhu, Tool support for just-in-time architecture reconstruction and evaluation: an experience report, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062548]
• 2: jEdit, ver 4.3, http://jedit.org, 2006.
• 3: Krutchen, P., Hilliard, R., Kazman, R., Kozaczynski, W., Obbink, H. and Ran, A. The Software Architecture Review and Assessment (SARA) Report, 2002.
• 4: 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]
• 5: Sangal, N., Jordan, E., Sinha, V., and Jackson, D. "Using Dependency Models to Manage

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: Interactive environments; Graphical environments

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management

Keywords:
automated software engineering, program comprehension, reverse engineering, software architecture