Collaborative Software Visualization for Program Comprehension

In the context of program comprehension, learning and working in teams, e.g., via pair programming, shared documentation, and discussions, can facilitate the comprehension tasks. So far, team collaboration is a relatively unexplored aspect in software visualizations, in particular approaches which are designed and explored to enable collaborative program comprehension.In this paper, we introduce our collaboratively usable software visualization environment for program comprehension. Related approaches are often limited to single-user modes, therefore neglect the advantages of multi-user collaboration, or allow only the use of a single type of device. Our approach addresses this topic and allows users to collaboratively explore software visualizations in a device-heterogeneous environment. User events, e.g., sharable pop-up information windows, are synchronized between each session participant, regardless of the employed device.To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first approaches that combines on-screen, virtual reality, and augmented reality modes in a single web-based SV tool for program comprehension. We conducted a user study to collect initial results regarding the perceived usefulness and enjoyment of co-explored software cities In that study, 20 participants collaboratively solved program comprehension tasks while using each mode consecutively. The results indicate that the majority of participants find our approach useful and enjoyable, with AR being the least favored mode. We provide each participant’s video recording, the study’s raw results, Jupyter Notebooks, and all steps to reproduce our evaluation as supplementary package. Furthermore, a live demo of our tool is available online.
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We invite other researchers to extend our open-source software and jointly research this novel approach.Video URL: https://youtu.be/MYAkRMWLVD8