A New View of Call Graphs for Visualising Code Structures
P. Young · 2002
Software visualisation promises to provide useful techniques for supporting the program comprehension process. One popular view of software structure is the call-graph which displays the relationships between functions in a program. Current software tools visualise these call-graphs as a directed graph. Typical software systems are very large and extremely complex, as a result they generally produce large and complex graphs which often present as much of a comprehension task as they attempt to address. This paper presents a new method for visualising call-graphs which moves away from the conventional node-link depiction. This new visualisation which uses a virtual reality environment shows how some of the conventional problems of call-graph visualisation can be overcome. 1. Introduction The term software visualisation has almost as many taxonomies as definitions [Price93, Roman93, Myers90], each one offering a slightly different meaning and classification. The most fitting definition...