Bringing Objects to Life: Supporting Program Comprehension Through Animated 2.5D Object Maps from Program Traces

Christoph Thiede, Willy Scheibel, Jürgen Döllner

2024

Abstract

Program comprehension is a key activity in software development. Several visualization approaches such as software maps have been proposed to support programmers in exploring the architecture of software systems. However, for the exploration of program behavior, programmers still rely on traditional code browsing and debugging tools to build a mental model of a system’s behavior. We propose a novel approach to visualizing program behavior through animated 2.5D object maps that depict particular objects and their interactions from a program trace. We describe our implementation and evaluate it for different program traces through an experience report and performance measurements. Our results indicate that our approach can benefit program comprehension tasks, but further research is needed to improve scalability and usability.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Thiede C., Scheibel W. and Döllner J. (2024). Bringing Objects to Life: Supporting Program Comprehension Through Animated 2.5D Object Maps from Program Traces. In Proceedings of the 19th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-679-8, SciTePress, pages 661-669. DOI: 10.5220/0012393900003660

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ivapp24,
author={Christoph Thiede and Willy Scheibel and Jürgen Döllner},
title={Bringing Objects to Life: Supporting Program Comprehension Through Animated 2.5D Object Maps from Program Traces},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP},
year={2024},
pages={661-669},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012393900003660},
isbn={978-989-758-679-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 19th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: IVAPP
TI - Bringing Objects to Life: Supporting Program Comprehension Through Animated 2.5D Object Maps from Program Traces
SN - 978-989-758-679-8
AU - Thiede C.
AU - Scheibel W.
AU - Döllner J.
PY - 2024
SP - 661
EP - 669
DO - 10.5220/0012393900003660
PB - SciTePress