Users' Perception on the Use of MetricAttitude to Perform Source Code Comprehension Tasks: A Focus Group Study

MetricAttitude [18] is a visualization approach implemented in an environment that provides a mental picture of an object-oriented software by means of polymetric views of classes. In this paper, we describe a qualitative investigation we have conducted with a focus group involving developers aiming at evaluating their viewpoint on the relevance of the support MetricAttitude provides to perform comprehension tasks on source code. This investigation also allowed us to gather information on the developers' opinion on the MetricAttitude features and its software visualization metaphors. The discussion was animated and participants provided a number of useful suggestions for improving the visualization. The tool was considered very useful, while some usability problems have to be addressed. Specifically, the information provided has to be further filtered to easier software comprehension tasks.

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