Re-documenting, visualizing and understanding software system using DocLike Viewer

Visualizing the artifacts of a software system graphically has proven to improve the cognitive strategies and understanding of the subject system by programmers. This is more crucial when they need to maintain a software system with out-dated documentation or without system documentation at all. Many tools have emerged and they predominantly consist of a reverse engineering environment and a viewer to visualize software artifacts such as in the form of graphs. The tools also grant structural redocumentation of existing software system but they do not directly utilize document-like software visualization in their approaches. We propose DocLike modularized graph (DMG) method that represents the software architectures of a reverse engineered subject system graphically in a modularized and standardized document-like manner. To realize this method, we have built a prototype tool called DocLike Viewer that enables a user to redocument, visualize and comprehend a subject system written in C language that is parsed by an existing parser. From the experiment conducted we found that our method managed to statistically improve cognition of a subject system in terms of productivity and quality to solve certain types of maintenance tasks.