G^SEE: a Generic Software Exploration Environment

Large software products are very difficult to understand. One way to cope with this problem is to provide tools generating different software views. Unfortunately, there are so many different entity types and relationships in a large software product that building a specific tool for each view is not cost-effective. This paper presents G^SEE (Generic Software Exploration Environment). G^SEE consists of an object-oriented framework and a set of customizable tools. Thanks to this environment, only a few lines are needed to produce graphical views from virtually any data source. G^SEE has been successfully applied to improving the understanding of different software artifacts, including a multi-million lines-of-code (LOC) program