Program visualization: bringing visual analysis to code development
Robert F. Erbacher, Georges Grinstein · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
This paper focuses on the visualization of application code. The goal is to provide a visual representation of the code that relieves the user from having to rely solely on textual representations. The visual representation of code can be correlated with visual displays of the data and displayed simultaneously within a single display. This prevents the user from having to change perceptual contexts or focus to a separate window. The visualization techniques are themselves based on the familiar metaphor of picture frames. Since we wish to provide the application data within the same display, representing operations and instructions as a frame around the application data provides a merged display with the data and operations correlated in an unobtrusive manner. The borders also work well by matching with the human perceptual systems ability to differentiate and characterize edges. The borders can be as simple as rectangles with the characteristics of the rectangle (i.e., thickness, color, consistency, etc.) identifying the type of operation. Portions of the frame can be made representative of the underlying data (i.e., current and termination conditions).