Blaze: supporting two-phased call graph navigation in source code

Authors:
Jan-Peter Krämer;Joachim Kurz;Thorsten Karrer;Jan Borchers
Affiliations:
RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany
Venue:
CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Understanding source code is crucial for successful software maintenance. A particularly important activity to understand source code is navigating the call graph [4]. Programmers have developed distinct strategies for effective call graph exploration [3, 9]. We introduce Blaze, a source code exploration tool tailored closely to these strategies. In a study, we compare Blaze to Stacksplorer [2], a tool that visualizes the immediate neighborhood of the current method in the call graph, to a tool resembling the standard Call Hierarchy view in the Eclipse IDE, and to an unmodified Xcode installation. The call graph exploration tools significantly increased success rates in typical software maintenance tasks, and using Stacksplorer or Blaze significantly reduced task completion times compared to using the Call Hierarchy or Xcode.