Recently, program visualization systems have received much attention as learning tools and as software understanding aids. How to evaluate these systems, however, is an open and unexplored area. In order to determine what factors may be important, we conducted an exploratory study using XTango, an algorithm animation system. First, we asked professors to complete surveys intended to solicit information regarding current practices in the teaching of algorithms. Next, we observed two groups of students: one group received a handout and viewed an animation of the Shellsort algorithm, the other received the same handout and listened to a lecture featuring drawings on the blackboard. The students were queried on their understanding of the sort and their impressions of the animation system. Comments indicated a high perceived value for the system, with most students favoring its use as a teaching tool. It was clear from students' responses that an algorithm animation system can be used more ...

Abstract—In order to characterize and improve software architecture visualization practice, the paper derives and constructs a qualitative framework, with seven key areas and 31 features, for the assessment of software architecture visualization tools. The framework is derived by the application of the Goal Question Metric paradigm to information obtained from a literature survey and addresses a number of stakeholder issues. The evaluation is performed from multiple stakeholder perspectives and in various architectural contexts. Stakeholders can apply the framework to determine if a particular software architecture visualization tool is appropriate to a given task. The framework is applied in the evaluation of a collection of six software architecture visualization tools. The framework may also be used as a design template for a comprehensive software architecture visualization tool. Index Terms—Software architecture, visualization, visualization methodologies, visualization assessment. Ç

This report proposes research with two goals. Firstly, to investigate how effective software visualizations can be designed and evaluated. Secondly, by building software visualizations for persistent programming environments to demonstrate these techniques, to understand the relationship between persistence and software visualization. The software visualization literature has been reviewed. It was found to provide very little guidance to the design of visualizations, and makes little consideration of users and their tasks both in the products it produces and the taxonomies it offers. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) offers the techniques of design principles, analytic evaluation and empirical evaluation for the design and evaluation of effective interactive systems. Their applicability to the design and evaluation of software visualization is reviewed. Analytic evaluation was found to be unsuitable for software visualization because it focuses on the input side of interaction, for exam...

VEDA is a visualisation environment that allows the operation of distributed applications to be visualised graphically for the purposes of testing and education. It contains a visualisation package which enables distributed processes to present their flow of control to the user in a graphical manner. With VEDA's visualisation capabilities as a platform it is the aim of this dissertation to develop a toolkit which will support the automatic visualisation of CORBA applications. The toolkit will be designed with a pedagogical function in mind and with undergraduates as the target audience. Essentially the dissertation can be broken up into two distinct tasks: The first phase of the dissertation will involve the modification an IDL compiler to enable the automatic generation of visualisation events. IDL specifies interfaces between CORBA objects. The IDL compiler generates small pieces of code known as client stubs and server skeletons which allow client processes to access remote server objects. The IDL compiler will be modified so as to produce instrumented stubs and skeletons. By instrumentation I mean the annotation of code with visualisation event calls. The event calls will convey pertinent information about the distributed object system to the visualisation engine. The visualisation engine in turn generates a graphical representation of application state and execution. The second phase of this dissertation involves extending VEDA's visualisation capabilities to accommodate the complexities of distributed object systems. The dissertation will be evaluated under the following criteria: ease of use, generality, transparency, intuitiveness and performance. IV Acknowledgements Thank you Jane for everything. Thanks to my family and friends for their support and encourage...

Abstract of the RPE

Software architecture visualization refers to the process of mapping entities in a software system domain to their graphical representation to aid comprehensive and development. Software visualization can be done based on seven key areas. There are mainly seven visualization tools to satisfy the attributes of seven key areas. Some of the attributes related to dynamic aspects should not supported by the existing tools. In order to support those aspects a new conceptual tool called DArch is proposed. By this we can achieve the properties related to dynamic perspectives. Every tool doesn’t support all the attributes related to key areas. So the comprehensive framework was designed to acquire all the key area attributes for complete software architecture visualization. Key words: DArch, DA, Architecture Visualizatione.

This research contributes two advances to the field of empirical study of parallel programming: first, the introduction of the Xbrowser system, a unique general-purpose hypertext/hypermedia system combining high-quality text formatting using TEX or LaTEX with author-controlled support for event-level protocol analysis and computer-assisted instruction. Second, an extensive ground-breaking empirical study using Xbrowser tested effects of dependence analysis and related factors on error severity and time required for successful comprehension of loop transformations relevant to both sequential and parallel program comprehension. The results show that graphical annotation of program source with dependence information as is done in the ParaScope parallel programming environment improves the time required to correctly comprehend the results of parallelizing loops, and that dependence type affects both time required for successful comprehension and severity of errors made in the attem...