Burd, E. L., Chan, P. S., Duncan, I. M. M., Munro, M., and Young, P., "Improving Visual Representations of Code", University of Durham, Technical Report 1996.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....were aimed at supporting understanding for education purposes. Visual programming systems support domain specific programming. Many of today s software visualization tools support software engineering tasks for large software systems. These tasks include: development activities (e.g. programming [2], debugging [1] testing [10] 5] etc. maintenance [7] e.g. fault detection [8, 10] re engineering, reverse engineering [16] etc. software process management, and marketing. Based on these specific tasks, the user needs to obtain different levels, or types, of understanding of the ....

Burd, E. L., Chan, P. S., Duncan, I. M. M., Munro, M., and Young, P., "Improving Visual Representations of Code", University of Durham, Technical Report 1996.

....or allowing nesting through multiple windows do make the graph more readable, however only a small area is visible at any one time and it is easy to loose context with regard to the whole graph. For this reason a number of strategies have been defined to improve existing graphical representations [Burd]. Some of these include: Simplification involving hiding of certain nodes and edges Layout heuristics for clear presentation of nodes and edges Presentation including use of color and fonts For the purpose of this paper, concentration will be on Java inheritance hierarchy diagrams. However, the ....

Burd E.L., Chan P.S., Duncan I.M.M., Munro M., Young P., Improving Visual Representations of Code, Visualization Research Group, Centre for Software Maintenance, University of Durham

....shown in the yz plane. By rotating through the third dimension, the user can mentally integrate two separate mental models. Although this technique has potential, there are several unresolved user interface issues of how to manipulate the two views. PLUM [57] and the Durham 3D visualization tool [58] also make use of a third dimension to cross reference multiple hierarchies. 3.2 Reduce the maintainer s cognitive overhead When comprehending larger software systems, cognitive overhead increases rapidly. Visualization tools are often supplied in an effort to reduce cognitive overhead. Cognitive ....

E.L. Burd, P.S. Chan, I.M.M. Duncan, M. Munro, and P. Young. Improving visual representations of code. Technical Report 10/96, University of Durham, Centre for Software Maintenance, October, 1992.

....plane. By rotating through the third dimension, the user can mentally integrate two separate mental models. Although this technique has potential, there are several unresolved user interface issues with respect to the manipulation of the two views. PLUM [123] and the Durham 3D visualization tool [22] also make use of a third dimension to cross reference multiple hierarchies. 4.2 Reduce the Maintainer s Cognitive Overhead When comprehending larger software systems, cognitive overhead increases rapidly. Visualization tools are often supplied in an effort to reduce cognitive overhead. Cognitive ....

E.L. Burd, P.S. Chan, I.M.M. Duncan, M. Munro, and P. Young. Improving visual representations of code. Technical Report 10/96, University of Durham, Centre for Software Maintenance, October 1996.

....for the investigation and visualisation of code are needed. The use of graphs for the display of program information and relations has been well documented, due to the popularity of this sort of display. A selection of this work can be found documented in the following papers; Burd et al. [Burd96], Vilela et al. Vile97] Jerding and Stasko [Jerd94] Ware et al. Ware93] and Storey et al. Stor96] 3.7 Visualisation in the Future These examples are generally of 3D visualisation and avoid the lines and boxes approach so long favoured in the program comprehension community. To try to ....

E. L. Burd, P. S. Chan, I. M. M. Duncan, M. Munro, P. Young. Improving Visual Representations of Code. University of Durham, Computer Science Technical Report 10/96, 1996.

....of a software system. These move away from the conventional visualisations of directed graphs and expand into a more flexible and information rich environment. The new visualisations and representations make use of virtual worlds rather than the more familiar and more limited flat visualisations [7]. One such system, FileVis, was introduced and evaluated here. In order to evaluate any new visualisations and representations an evaluation framework has been proposed based on a set of desirable properties. This framework has been used to evaluate the FileVis visualisation which performed well ....

E.L. Burd, P.S. Chan, I.M.M. Duncan, M. Munro and P. Young, Improving Visual Representations of Code, Technical Report 10/96, Centre for Software Maintenance, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, 1996. http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/Document s/tr-10-96

....been developed for presenting, simplifying and exploring such structures. Graph reduction is concerned with simplifying the graph structure by applying various strategies such as hiding less interesting information, clustering semantically related nodes and nesting nodes and arcs as appropriate [Burd96] Methods for exploring and recovering these reduced graphs are also very important. Graph presentation techniques generally consist of applying a layout algorithm to the graph structure and driving it with goals such as minimising crossing arcs or grouping related nodes [Di Battista94] These ....

E.L. Burd, P.S. Chan, I.M.M. Duncan, M. Munro and P. Young, Improving Visual Representations of Code, Technical Report 10/96, Centre for Software Maintenance, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, 1996. http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/Documents/tr-10-96

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