期刊名称：The International Arab Journal of Information Technology
印刷版ISSN：1683-3198
出版年度：2005
卷号：2
期号：1
出版社：Zarqa Private University
摘要：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.
关键词：Software maintenance; software visualization; program comprehension
