An interactive visualization environment for exploring Java programs: SHriMP views revisited

A decade ago, projects in the program comprehension community investigated how software visualization could enhance the exploration and navigation of large software systems. At IWPC in 2001, we demonstrated the SHriMP (Simple Hierarchical Multiple Perspective) visualization tool, which provided a navigable interface integrating a variety of graph-based layouts with hypertext versions of source code and documentation. At the time, there were a number of tools that shared some of SHriMP's features and researchers shared challenges when implementing these tools, as well as in understanding how they could evaluate these tools for future adoption. In this talk, I will review SHriMP's early features and demonstrate how the tool was eventually integrated with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. I will also discuss some of the successful and unsuccessful approaches we used to evaluate this and other visualization tools. I will conclude by discussing the many lessons we learned throughout the SHriMP research project, while highlighting some of the challenges that are still relevant in today's research.