VisUML: Live & Interactive Diagrams

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possible changes involved in a maintenance task can be time consuming especially if its design document is absence or outdated. In this case, visualizing the software artefacts 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 artefacts 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 artefacts 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.

Journal of Information Technology Education: Research

Few beginners find learning to program easy. There are many factors at work in this phenomenon with some being simply inherent in the subject itself, while others have more to do with deficiencies in learning methods and resources. As a result, many programming environments, software applications, and learning tools have been developed to address the difficulties faced by novice programmers. Of these tools, visual-based tools and the use of visualization have proven to be very effective in helping novices overcome several of these traditional difficulties. In this paper, we first examine the traditional difficulties that novice programmers encounter when take an introductory-level programming course are examined. It is important to gain an understanding of the scope of these difficulties first, as the rest of this paper considers how visual tools, visualization, and UML can be utilized to aid novice developers in these areas of difficulties. Next, we provide an analysis of several modern visual learning tools, including EROSI, AnimPascal, BlueJ, FLINT, BOOST, and SOLVEIT. In particular, we look at how these tools use visualization to help mitigate the difficulties novice programmers face. Each tool is also assessed based on its overall effectiveness of using visual aids and visualization to help the beginning programmer. We then turn our attention to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and how it can be utilized to help the novice programmer in system design and modeling. The UML specification is carefully discussed, and aspects of the specification that hold the most potential for aiding novice programmers are identified. Finally, we focus on UML modeling and present the theoretical foundation for a new visual learning tool based on the UML standard. This proposed learning environment attempts to combine promising attributes of existing tools we previously examined, along with the potential benefits of UML-based modeling. The proposed tool would provide a superior learning environment for the novice programmer for several reasons. First, it is heavily based in the visual domain. Visual tools have continually proven to be extremely powerful in helping novices in learning abstract computer concepts. In addition, visualization helps novices construct a mental model of concepts, which is pivotal to further comprehension and understanding. Second, the proposed environment would allow for a constructivist learning approach, constraining the UML domain for novices, yet easily expanded for more complex projects as the student progresses. Finally, this tool would naturally aid in solution delivery and documentation of the learner's path to solution.

As computers become more pervasive, more programs deal with real-world input and output (real-world I/O) such as processing camera images and controlling robots. The realworld I/O usually contains complex data hardly represented by text or symbols, while most of the current integrated development environments (IDEs) are equipped with textbased editors and debuggers. My thesis investigates how visual representations of the real world can be integrated within the text-based development environment to enhance the programming experience. In particular, we have designed and implemented IDEs for three scenarios, all of which make use of photos and videos representing the real world. Based on these experiences, we discuss "programming with example data," a technique where the programmer demonstrates examples to the IDE and writes text-based code with support of the examples.

Programmers spend much of their time investigating the source code of a program, which often involves navigating and understanding delocalized code fragments. This Ph.D. project explores the use of information visualizations that are designed to support programmers in these activities. I use controlled experiments to provide precise measurements of the usability of visualizations and detailed insight into users' interaction with visualizations. Also, case studies are used to understand how professional programmers use visualizations in realistic work activity. Overall, this research will contribute empirically founded insight into the design and use of visualizations in programming.

Computer, 1995

2004

In this paper, we present the development of a program parser coupled with an off-the-shelf interactive program visualization tool that assists in the understanding of complex computer programs. The major objective of this work is to quickly help newcomers become familiar with existing software code and become productive members of the software development team. These software systems that often incorporate several interacting pieces will be produced and maintained by several individuals and/or vendors. Hence, it will be difficult for one individual or group to be fully cognizant of the intricacies of the overall software system. In work-related training, interactive visual systems will be required to provide support for teaching organizations' newer workforce to quickly learn and effectively contribute to the development and maintenance of these complex and critical software systems. An environment that provides an in-depth view of the software system will be necessary to fulfill this requirement. Additionally, an interactive visual system may provide a means to dynamically access and analyze the skills and capabilities of trainees for skill-based job placement.

Proceedings - 2011 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing, VL/HCC 2011, 2011

Integrated development environments (IDEs) include many tools that provide the means to construct programs. Coincidentally, the very same IDEs are a primary vehicle for program comprehension. We claim that IDEs may be an impediment for program comprehension because they treat software elements as text, which may be counterproductive in the context of program understanding-where abstracting from the source text to the level of structural entities and relationships is the key.

2000

Code development for projects that are not trivial is time consuming and difficult. A well structured approach is essential to produce satisfactory results. One major problem facing the programmer is the need to conceptualize the structure of the program that is being written or maintained in order to completely understand the program while browsing it's source listing. This problem may be overcome by providing a tool that allows code to be browsed within the confines of a visual representation of the program's structure. This paper reviews the requirements for a tool to provide such a mechanism and describes the design of DUCAT (Deakin University C Analysis Tool) which addresses these requirements. DUCAT provides a call graph of a program and allows the user to browse functions individually by interacting with the call graph.

ACM Sigcse Bulletin, 2002

This paper discusses how novices exposed to an execution model of recursion (similar to an expert's mental model and visualised in the EROSI tutor) performed on the task of constructing an embedded recursive solution to a given problem specification. Empirical observations showed that after using the EROSI tutor, novices employed a variety of methods during program construction including the use

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2004

We present a framework for modeling visual notations and for generating the corresponding visual programming environments. The framework can be used for modeling the diagrammatic notations of software development methodologies, and to generate visual programming environments with CASE tools functionalities. This is accomplished through an underlying modeling process based on the visual notation syntactic model of eXtended Positional Grammars (XPG, for short), and the associated parsing methodology, XpLR. In particular, the process requires the modeling of the basic elements (visual symbols) of a visual notation, their syntactic properties, the relations between them, the syntactic rules to formally define the set of feasible visual sentences, and a set of semantic routines performing additional checks and translation tasks. Such a process is completely supported by the VLDesk system, which enables the automatic generation of an editor for drawing visual sentences, as well as a processor for their recognition, parsing, and translation into other notations.