A Tool for Visual Understanding of Source Code Dependencies

Many program comprehension tools use graphs to visualize and analyze source code. The main issue is that existing approaches create graphs overloaded with too much information. Graphs contain hundreds of nodes and even more edges that cross each other. Understanding these graphs and using them for a given program comprehension task is tedious, and in the worst case developers stop using the tools. In this paper we present DA4Java, a graph-based approach for visualizing and analyzing static dependencies between Java source code entities. The main contribution of DA4Java is a set of features to incrementally compose graphs and remove irrelevant nodes and edges from graphs. This leads to graphs that contain significantly fewer nodes and edges and need less effort to understand.