Multidimensional browsing
Antero Taivalsaari · 2002
Modern software engineering environments provide different kinds of browsers and other graphical tools for inspecting and managing the various dimensions of software systems. These tools include configuration and version browsers for analyzing and managing the development history of the system, file browsers for managing the files belonging to the system, class browsers for examining the specialization (inheritance) structure of the system, module or component browsers for investigating the subsystem or part-whole structure, and different kinds of dependency browsers for viewing, e.g., the subroutine/method call dependencies. In this paper, we introduce the idea of multidimensional browsing that allows us to replace many of these previously separate roots with just one tool. We have implemented and included a multidimensional browsing tool in a software design environment that is in daily use at Nokia.