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Enhancing Cognitive Aspects of Software Visualization Using DocLike Modularized Graph

Shahida Sulaiman¹, Norbik Bashah Idris², and Shamsul Sahibuddin³

¹Faculty of Computer Science, University Sains Malaysia, Malaysia

²Center for Advanced Software Engineering, University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia

³Faculty of Computer Science and Information System, University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia

Abstract: Understanding an existing software system to trace possible changes involved in a maintenance task can be time consuming especially if its design document is absence or out-dated. In this case, visualizing the software artifacts graphically may improve the cognition of the subject system by software maintainers. A number of tools have emerged and they generally consist of a reverse engineering environment and a viewer to visualize software artifacts such as in the form of graphs. The tools also grant structural re-documentation of existing software systems but they do not explicitly employ document-like software visualization in their methods. This paper proposes DocLike Modularized Graph method that represents the software artifacts of a reverse engineered subject system graphically, module-by-module in a document-like re-documentation environment. The method is utilized in a prototype tool named DocLike viewer that generates graphical views of a C language software system parsed by a selected C language parser. Two experiments were conducted to validate how much the proposed method could improve cognition of a subject system by software maintainers without documentation, in terms of productivity and quality. Both results deduce that the method has the potential to improve cognitive aspects of software visualization to support software maintainers in finding solutions of assigned maintenance tasks.

Keywords: Software maintenance, software visualization, program comprehension.

Received July 21, 2003; accepted March 8, 2004