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Blaze: supporting two-phased call graph navigation in source code

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding source code is crucial for successful software maintenance. A particularly important activity to understand source code is navigating the call graph [4]. Programmers have developed distinct strategies for effective call graph exploration [3, 9]. We introduce Blaze, a source code exploration tool tailored closely to these strategies. In a study, we compare Blaze to Stacksplorer [2], a tool that visualizes the immediate neighborhood of the current method in the call graph, to a tool resembling the standard Call Hierarchy view in the Eclipse IDE, and to an unmodified Xcode installation. The call graph exploration tools significantly increased success rates in typical software maintenance tasks, and using Stacksplorer or Blaze significantly reduced task completion times compared to using the Call Hierarchy or Xcode.

References

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T. Karrer, J.-P. Krämer, J. Diehl, B. Hartmann, and J. Borchers. Stacksplorer: Call graph navigation helps increasing code maintenance efficiency. In Proc. UIST '11. ACM, 2011.
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R. S. Pressman. Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. McGraw-Hill, 7th edition, 2010.
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M. P. Robillard, W. Coelho, and G. C. Murphy. How Eective Developers Investigate Source Code:An Exploratory Study. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 30(12), 2004.
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '12: CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2012
    2864 pages
    ISBN:9781450310161
    DOI:10.1145/2212776

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 05 May 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. development tools
    2. programming environments
    3. toolkits
    4. visualization

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