A comparative evaluation of dynamic visualisation tools

Despite their potential applications in software comprehension, it appears that dynamic visualisation tools are seldom used outside the research laboratory. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of five dynamic visualisation tools - AVID, Jinsight, jRMTool, Together ControlCenter diagrams and Together ControlCenter debugger. The tools were evaluated on a number of general software comprehension and specific reverse engineering tasks using the HotDraw objectoriented framework. The tasks considered typical comprehension issues, including identification of software structure and behaviour, design pattern extraction, extensibility potential, maintenance issues, functionality location, and runtime load. The results revealed that the level of abstraction employed by a tool affects its success in different tasks, and that tools were more successful in addressing specific reverse engineering tasks than general software comprehension activities. It was found that no one tool performs well in all tasks, and some tasks were beyond the capabilities of all five tools. This paper concludes with suggestions for improving the efficacy of such tools

Architectural reflection for software evolution

Software evolution is expensive. Lehman identifies several problems associated with it: Continuous adaptation, increasing complexity, continuing growth, and declining quality. This paper proposes that a reflective software engineering environment will address these problems by employing languages and techniques from the software architecture community. Creating a software system will involve manipulating a collection of views, including low-level code views and high-level architectural views which will be tied together using reflection. This coupling will allow the development environment to automatically identify inconsistencies between the views, and support software engineers in managing architectures during evolution. This paper proposes a research programme which will result in a software engineering environment which addresses problems of software evolution and the maintenance of consistency between architectural views of a software system