A visualization system of source codes using FOL
Min-Jung Bae, Jeong-Hoon Ji, Gyun Woo · 2008
It is a tedious and time-consuming task to understand the source code of a program, even for programming experts. Not a few methods suggested measuring the complexity of a source code, namely software metrics. But, every software metrics focuses on a specific facet of the source code and it also needs a specific knowledge of the software metric discipline to understand the metric values. In some cases, however, we’d like to get a glance of the complexity of the structure of a program without a specific knowledge or a burden of analyzing the details of the program structure. This paper suggests a new visualization method which is based on FOL (flower of life) diagram. The visualization result is intuitive for programming novices and can be presented in different levels of details. Further, we suggested a method to measure the complexity of the visualization result. According to the experimental results, the correlation between the complexity of the FOL diagram and the execution time of programs is in a meaningful range.