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Creating Useful Visualisations as Documentation Supporting Code Reuse

stuart marshall
( new zealander )

victoria university of wellington
c/o Stuart Marshall School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600 New Zealand
tel: +64 4 472 1000 extn 7033
fax:
stuart.marshall@vuw.ac.nz

Keywords:

class libraries debugging software engineering visualisation test driving

Abstract:

The software engineering community has encountered difficulties in meeting the demand for new software. A proposed solution is to reuse the code from earlier projects in new projects so as to reduce the time and effort required to develop new products. However, code reuse has yet to be fully successful and meet its potential. One possible reason for this is the time and effort required by a programmer to understand a unit of code before they can decide if, where and how to reuse it. This PhD thesis will follow on from my MSc thesis on the same topic, researching in more depth methods of aiding a programmer to understand how to reuse code via the development, use and evaluation of tool support. These tools will allow programmers to invoke code and create visualisations to tap into the human ability to process complex imagery, so as to promote understanding. The major objectives of this PhD thesis are to further develop, use and evaluate tools that can help a programmer to better understand code with a mind to reusing it. This in turn should save time and effort in the development of software products, reducing the overall cost and helping to meet the currently high demand for software. Following on from the results of research conducted during the successful completion of my MSc thesis, the research will focus on the degrees of control that a programmer needs over code to fully understand it, and the usefulness and required expressiveness of visualisations to convey information regarding the code. In my MSc thesis, these visualisations (i.e. images and animations) were created directly from programmer interactions with the code. A further objective of the PhD will be to see what form the connections between code and visualisation need to take to help a programmer better understand code.

The PhD work started: March 17th 2000

The submitted work will probably not be presented in the
upcoming ECOOP PhD Workshop.

HTML3
JAVA

 

Last modified on Mon Aug 15 14:59:24 2005