Graph Buddy — an interactive code dependency browsing and visualization tool

Source code comprehension of massively growing code bases is the first crucial step in today’s software development. One of the significant obstacles in reading the source code is understanding the code dependencies. To aid this process, we developed Graph Buddy, a tool integrated as a plugin for popular IDEs, which enables interactive visual code browsing as a graph of semantic code dependencies. To preserve the direct relation to the source code, visualize, and process only the right amount of details, we have developed Semantic Code Graph (SCG), an information model underlying Graph Buddy, capable of representing detailed code semantics. We implemented the SCG model extraction for the Scala and Java languages. To evaluate Graph Buddy, we conducted a user survey on a group of 10 programmers who used the tool in three programming-related tasks. The survey indicates that the tasks would be difficult to solve without the visual browsing tool. We believe that the proposed solution has a strong potential to enhance the way programmers comprehend code dependencies.