Automated construction of memory diagrams for program comprehension

Authors:
Andrew R. Dalton;William Kreahling
Affiliations:
Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC;Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC
Venue:
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Southeast Regional Conference
Year:
2010

Citing 7
Cited 0

Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software

Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software
Do visualizations improve program comprehensibility? experiments with control structure diagrams for Java

Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
The Control Structure Diagram: An Overview and InitialEvaluation

Empirical Software Engineering
An Overview of the GXL Graph Exchange Language

Revised Lectures on Software Visualization, International Seminar
CS1 assessment using memory diagrams

Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Visualising Java data structures as graphs

ACE '04 Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 30
Unified Modeling Language User Guide, The (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

Unified Modeling Language User Guide, The (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Memory diagrams serve as a visualization technique that enables students to better understand the abstract state of program memory. Unlike traditional program visualizations, memory diagrams illustrate where variables of different types and storage classes are allocated. Our experience is that memory diagrams enhance the ability of novice programmers to understand object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, however, constructing these diagrams by hand can prove tedious. We introduce a toolkit for constructing memory diagrams. The toolkit enables students to verify their understanding of the state of their programs' memory, and allows instructors to generate both correct and incorrect diagrams to test their students' understanding of course material. We evaluate the toolkit in terms of its ability to generate visualizations of various Java language constructs including enumerations, arrays, and reference aliasing.