Authors:
Glauco de F. Carneiro
1
and
Manoel Gomes de Mendonça
2
Affiliations:
1
Salvador University (UNIFACS), Brazil
;
2
Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil
Keyword(s):
Software Visualization, Software Comprehension, Multiple View Environments.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Software Engineering
;
Tools, Techniques and Methodologies for System Development
Abstract:
In spite of the available resources provided by modern IDEs, program understanding remains as a very difficult and important task in software engineering. This paper presents a software visualization environment named SourceMiner. Implemented as an Eclipse plug-in to enhance software comprehension activities, SourceMiner is an extensible, interactive and coordinated multi-perspective environment. It is multi-perspective because it provides sets of views that allow programmers to look at the software from different points of view. It is coordinated because views are linked to each other, and consistently respond to the actions executed by the programmers on the environment. It is interactive in the sense that programmers can dynamically configure visual scenarios to better support the building of mental models. It is extensible because its architecture was designed to facilitate the inclusion of new views to the environment. This paper describes the principles behind the design of Sou
rceMiner, and discusses how it has been used to support software comprehension activities such as the identification of code smells and the characterization of object-oriented software systems.
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