Visualizing Object-oriented Software for Understanding and Documentation
This addresses the difficulty of software comprehension for programmers in maintenance and documentation tasks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding and documenting object-oriented software by proposing an automatic visualization approach that mines source code dependencies and quantitative information, and it reports that most systems were documented correctly in case studies.
Understanding or comprehending source code is one of the core activities of software engineering. Understanding object-oriented source code is essential and required when a programmer maintains, migrates, reuses, documents or enhances source code. The source code that is not comprehended cannot be changed. The comprehension of object-oriented source code is a difficult problem solving process. In order to document object-oriented software system there are needs to understand its source code. To do so, it is necessary to mine source code dependencies in addition to quantitative information in source code such as the number of classes. This paper proposes an automatic approach, which aims to document object-oriented software by visualizing its source code. The design of the object-oriented source code and its main characteristics are represented in the visualization. Package content, class information, relationships between classes, dependencies between methods and software metrics is displayed. The extracted views are very helpful to understand and document the object-oriented software. The novelty of this approach is the exploiting of code dependencies and quantitative information in source code to document object-oriented software efficiently by means of a set of graphs. To validate the approach, it has been applied to several case studies. The results of this evaluation showed that most of the object-oriented software systems have been documented correctly.