Document Type

Theses, Ph.D

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Publication Details

Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Applied Intelligence Research Center School of Computer Science, Technological University Dublin, February 14, 2019

Abstract

Software development is a complex undertaking composed of several activities that include reading, writing, and modifying source code. Indeed, previous studies have shown that the majority of the effort invested in software development is dedicated to understanding code. This includes understanding the static structure, dynamic behaviour, and evolution of the code. Given these particular characteristics, as well as the high complexity of source code, it is reasonable to consider how visualisation can facilitate source code understanding. This work proposes to extend existing software development tools with visualisations that can be used to encode the various complex features within a source code document. Further, this work establishes a design space which includes a series of visualisations that are meant to complement existing textual views of source code, as found in source code editors. Several prototype visualisations are presented in this work which utilise various visualisation techniques, such as tree visualisations techniques and visualisation techniques based on the code-map metaphor. This work also presents several experiments, where the results of these experiments indicate that combining existing software development tools with visualisations can have a positive effect on source code understanding. Additionally, the result of the experiments show that the less a visualisation is abstracted from the original textural representation of a source code document, in terms of line, token, ordering, and character information, the more likely it is that viewers can link the visualisation to the code and back.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/d1av-ks51

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