Visualization of domain-specific programs' behavior

1996

ions come at different granularities,and the probability that a given abstraction is relevant to a problem often seems inverse to itscomplexity. Should we therefore aim to create a vocabulary of abstraction, or a mechanism forhiding it? Should we facilitate (or even require) the creation of new abstractions, or isvisualisation primarily a communicative device for conveying one person's abstract view of

Proceedings of Methods, Materials and Tools for …

2016

is a discipline of Software En-gineering aimed at creating models, methods, techniques and tools, based on a learning process and engineering process, to help the engineer in get-ting a deeper knowledge about software systems. The learning process is concerned with the mental process followed by the programmer when he needs to understand programs. This topic is explained in the context of Cognitive Models. The engineering process includes the study of methods for: Informa-tion Extraction from Programs and Software/Data Visualization. The research in these areas allows to build Program Comprehension tools with quality. Moreover, it aids in to inter-connecting the problem do-main (system behavior) and program domain (software components). This is one of the biggest challenge in PC. In this paper, we present the background and results obtained in the top-ics described above during a Ph.D. thesis denominated: Program Inspec-tion to inter-connect the Operational and Behavioral Views for ...

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.

2019

Software system’s understanding is the essential part of the software maintenance. Documentation and program source code could be the first aspect in software system’s understanding and its inner work-flow. This understanding of code is known as Program Comprehension (PC). With the advancement in technology and rapid growth in industry, information systems require frequent changes. This change need to be implement a specific idea or behavior which is named as “Concept”. Concept (variable, class, method) is referred as a typical behavior of code performing specific functionality like a student enrollment in student portal. In large scale systems, to locate the concept in the code is a very challenging task which require massive amount of time if performed in conventional ways. The conventional ways mean start finding the location by going through each and every file of the code. Programmer tries to locate these concepts with the help of domain knowledge using concept location techniq...

2008

One of the definitions for visualization is to give a visible appearance to something, making

Computer Science and Information Systems, 2008

In the past, we have been looking for program comprehension tools that are able to interconnect operational and behavioral views, aiming at aiding the software analyst to relate problem and program domains in order to reach a full understanding of software systems. In this paper we are concerned with Program Comprehension issues applied to Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). We are now willing to understand how techniques and tools for the comprehension of traditional programming languages fit in the understanding of DSLs. Being the language tailored for the description of problems in a specific domain, we believe that specific visualizations (at a higher abstraction level, closer to the problem level) could and should be defined to enhance the comprehension of the descriptions in that particular domain.

2012

This paper is concerned with an ontology driven approach for Program Comprehension that starts picking up concepts from the problem domain ontology, analyzing source code and, after locating problem concepts in the code, goes up and links them to the programming language ontology. Different location techniques are used to search for concepts embedded in comments, in the code (identifier names and execution traces), and in string-literals associated with I/O statements. The expected result is a mapping between problem domain concepts and code slices. This mapping can be visualized using graph-based approaches like, for instance, navigation facilities through a System Dependency Graph. The paper also describes a PCTool suite, Quixote, that implements the approach proposed.

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

Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 1993