Interactive call graph generation for software projects
István-Attila Császár, Radu Răzvan Slăvescu · 2020
This paper presents a tool aiming to help software developers visualize the call graph of their code while editing it. The tool can generate both the import graph and the call graph. It allows the user to select the nodes and edges to be displayed and, when s/he saves the document, it automatically updates the graph to reflect the current state of the project. The process of building the call graph or the import graph from the source code is based on using a query based architecture, commonly used by language servers. Performance benchmarks show that the tool can react to changes in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. To evaluate the tool usability, this was sent to 20 random users of which 9 decided to assess it. All respondents had an overall positive impression (gave a grade of 4 or 5 on a scale from 1 to 5) and also found the tool fast and easy to use.