Software Visualisation for Object-Oriented Program Comprehension
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
A survey of trace exploration tools and techniques
CASCON '04 Proceedings of the 2004 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
A survey and evaluation of tool features for understanding reverse-engineered sequence diagrams
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Special Issue on Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis (PCODA)
Towards a metrics-based framework for assessing comprehension of software visualization systems
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Human interface: Part I
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Despite their potential applications in softwarecomprehension, it appears that dynamic visualisationtools are seldom used outside the research laboratory.This paper presents an empirical evaluation of fivedynamic visualisation tools - AVID, Jinsight, jRMTool,Together ControlCenter diagrams and TogetherControlCenter debugger. The tools were evaluated on anumber of general software comprehension and specificreverse engineering tasks using the HotDraw object-orientedframework. The tasks considered typicalcomprehension issues, including identification of softwarestructure and behaviour, design pattern extraction,extensibility potential, maintenance issues, functionalitylocation, and runtime load. The results revealed that thelevel of abstraction employed by a tool affects its successin different tasks, and that tools were more successful inaddressing specific reverse engineering tasks thangeneral software comprehension activities. It was foundthat no one tool performs well in all tasks, and some taskswere beyond the capabilities of all five tools. This paperconcludes with suggestions for improving the efficacy ofsuch tools.