Managing Views in a Program Understanding Tool

Program understanding tools typically offer built-in visual representations of the subject software, such as call graphs and class hierarchies, and textual representations, such as cross-reference listings and exact-interface reports. It is useful to bundle a number of these visual and textual frames, with some annotation, into a view for redocumentation purposes. For large, legacy software systems, however, the abundance of created views can be a major problem. This paper investigates a number of methods for improving the organization of these views for improved usability and scalability. 1 Introduction Many software systems have internal documentation that is often out-of-date and thus unreliable. Even when the documentation exists, it may be dispersed in several places and may not be well structured. Yet accurate, complete, well-organized, and maintainable documentation is critical for soft- This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council..

3 Managing Views in a Program Understanding Tool

Program understanding tools typically offe