Architectural Visualization of C/C++ Source Code for Program Comprehension
Thomas Panas, T W Epperly, Quinlan, D, Andreas Sæbjørnsen, Richard W. Vuduc · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 2006
Structural and behavioral visualization of large-scale legacy systems to aid program comprehension is still a major challenge. The challenge is even greater when applications are implemented in flexible and expressive languages such as C and C++. In this paper, we consider visualization of static and dynamic aspects of large-scale scientific C/C++ applications. For our investigation, we reuse and integrate specialized analysis and visualization tools. Furthermore, we present a novel layout algorithm that permits a compressive architectural view of a large-scale software system. Our layout is unique in that it allows traditional program visualizations, i.e., graph structures, to be seen in relation to the application's file structure.