Manipulating and documenting software structures using SHriMP views

TLDR

Program understanding benefits from browsing, exploring, and creating multi‑level abstraction views, but large legacy systems risk losing context, so fisheye visualization helps maintain context. The paper introduces Simple Hierarchical Multi‑Perspective views (SHriMPs). SHriMPs provide a hierarchical, multi‑perspective visualization of software structures. Integrating SHriMPs into Rigi improves documentation of design patterns and architectural diagrams across abstraction levels, as demonstrated by selected program understanding tasks.

Abstract

An effective approach to program understanding involves browsing, exploring, and creating views that document software structures at different levels of abstraction. While exploring the myriad of relationships in a multi-million line legacy system, one can easily loose context. One approach to alleviate this problem is to visualize these structures using fisheye techniques. This paper introduces Simple Hierarchical Multi-Perspective views (SHriMPs). The SHriMP visualization technique has been incorporated into the Rigi reverse engineering system. This greatly enhances Rigi's capabilities for documenting design patterns and architectural diagrams that span multiple levels of abstraction. The applicability and usefulness of SHriMPs is illustrated with selected program understanding tasks.