Visualization Techniques for Program Comprehension - A Literature Review

Understanding software is getting more complex as programs are getting ever bigger. Many believe that the key to this problem is better visualization. The objective of this document is to provide an as thorough as possible overview of this field. This is the starting point for further research and development in this critical area. Over 140 papers and nearly as many tools were reviewed for this purpose. This document presents the most relevant and significant ones. It also tries to identify the essential requirements of a software visualization component.

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[11]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Tree-maps: a space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures , 1991, Proceeding Visualization '91.

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[21]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Tree visualization with tree-maps: 2-d space-filling approach , 1992, TOGS.

[22]  Anne Rogers,et al.  Visualizing and Analyzing Software Infrastructures , 2001, IEEE Softw..

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[24]  Peter Eades,et al.  A Heuristic for Graph Drawing , 1984 .

[25]  Aulikki Hyrskykari,et al.  Development of Program Visualization Systems , 1999 .

[26]  John Domingue,et al.  Software visualization : programming as a multimedia experience , 1998 .

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[28]  Andrian Marcus,et al.  3D representations for software visualization , 2003, SoftVis '03.

[29]  John T. Stasko,et al.  The information mural: a technique for displaying and navigating large information spaces , 1995, Proceedings of Visualization 1995 Conference.

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[34]  Peter Young.  A New View of Call Graphs for Visualising Code Structures , 2002 .

[35]  Gruia-Catalin Roman,et al.  Program visualization: the art of mapping programs to pictures , 1992, International Conference on Software Engineering.

[36]  Rudolf K. Keller,et al.  A Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation of Software Visualization Tools , 2001 .

[37]  John Stasko,et al.  Using Animation to Design, Document and Trace Object-Oriented Systems , 1992 .

[38]  Shihong Huang,et al.  Documenting software systems with views III: towards a task-oriented classification of program visualization techniques , 2002, SIGDOC '02.

[39]  Ivan Herman,et al.  Graph Visualization and Navigation in Information Visualization: A Survey , 2000, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..