Interactive Exploration of Compact Sequence Diagrams - JIVE based approaches

Sequence diagrams are a popular visualization notation to refine and describe use case scenarios for object oriented application development. They are used to model/specify object-to-object interactions in clear sequence. Tools such as JIVE can be used to re-construct back the scenario from a real program execution in the form of sequence diagram. The sequence diagrams thus obtained tend to be large and hence JIVE provides novel options to compact the visualization structure without distorting the semantics. In this paper, an interactive technique to explore compact sequence diagrams that allows users to expand and examine the compacted portions on demand is presented. At the heart of the technique is the call tree implementation that forms the back-end of the visualization. The call tree is extended to work with the sequence diagram at the front-end in the symbiotic manner enabling interactive exploration. The utility of the technique is demonstrated through experiments with a variety of programs.