A Qualitative Investigation of Landmarks in Software Code Navigation
Sandeep Reddivari, Tanmay Bhowmik · 2018
A large body of research is available on software clustering and many tools have been developed to assist software programmers to navigate and easily comprehend large software systems. However, minimal attention has been paid to the area of visual clustering to support code navigation. In this paper, we leverage clustering-based visualization to explore static-dependency-based landmarks present in the code base. Landmarks are important legibility features that developers use as reference points. Our qualitative investigation of a java project reveals developers' reliance on the landmarks during code navigation and shows the promise of using static dependencies to uncover the landmarks in the software space.