Relo: helping users manage context during interactive exploratory visualization of large codebases

Authors:
Vineet Sinha;David Karger;Rob Miller
Affiliations:
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Cambridge, MA;MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Cambridge, MA;MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Cambridge, MA
Venue:
eclipse '05 Proceedings of the 2005 OOPSLA workshop on Eclipse technology eXchange
Year:
2005

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Abstract

As software systems grow in size and use more third-party libraries and frameworks, the need for developers to understand unfamiliar large codebases is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we present a tool, Relo, that supports developers' understanding by allowing interactive exploration of code. As the developer explores relationships found in the code, Relo builds and automatically manages the context in a visualization, thereby helping build the developer's mental representation of the code. Developers can group viewed artifacts or use the viewed items to ask Relo for further exploration suggestions. Relo is built as an Eclipse plug-in integrated into the Java Tooling (JDT), and uses a standard, RDF, based backend allowing for maintaining code relationships and performing inferences about the relationships.