Re-documenting, visualizing and understanding software system using DocLike Viewer

Visualizing the artifacts of a software system graphically has proven to improve the cognitive strategies and understanding of the subject system by programmers. This is more crucial when they need to maintain a software system with out-dated documentation or without system documentation at all. Many tools have emerged and they predominantly consist of a reverse engineering environment and a viewer to visualize software artifacts such as in the form of graphs. The tools also grant structural redocumentation of existing software system but they do not directly utilize document-like software visualization in their approaches. We propose DocLike modularized graph (DMG) method that represents the software architectures of a reverse engineered subject system graphically in a modularized and standardized document-like manner. To realize this method, we have built a prototype tool called DocLike Viewer that enables a user to redocument, visualize and comprehend a subject system written in C language that is parsed by an existing parser. From the experiment conducted we found that our method managed to statistically improve cognition of a subject system in terms of productivity and quality to solve certain types of maintenance tasks.

1. Introduction

Visualization for software is also called software visualization (SV). It has played a great role as a method in program comprehension, which is vital in the costly software maintenance. According to Price et al. [7], software visualization is the use of interactive computer graphics, typography, graphic design, animation and cinematography to enhance interface between the software engineers or the computer science student and their programs. The objective is to use graphics to enhance the understanding of a program that has already been written.