Sonification design guidelines to enhance program comprehension

Faced with the challenges of understanding the source code of a program, software developers are assisted by a wealth of software visualization research. This work explores how visualization can be supplemented by sonification as a cognitive tool for code comprehension. By engaging the programmer's auditory senses, sonification can improve the utility of program comprehension tools. This paper reports on our experiences of creating and evaluating a program comprehension prototype tool that employs sonification to assist program understanding by rendering sonic cues. Our empirical evaluation of the efficacy of information sonification indicates that this cognitive aid can effectively complement visualization when trying to understand an unfamiliar code base. Based on our experiences, we then propose a set of guidelines for the design of a new generation of tools that increase their information utility by combining visualization and sonification.