PPIG 2008 - 20th Annual Workshop
The Importance of Cognitive and Usability Elements in Designing Software Visualization Tools
Glauco de F. Carneiro, Manoel Mendonça
Abstract: Modern IDEs offer built-in support for developing plug-ins. More recently, we have seen a growing number of plug-ins that offer non-conventional software visualization interfaces. They usually aim to help programmers to understand unfamiliar source code by representing it in visual structures such as trees, scatter-plots or graphs. Although very attractive visually, we need to know more about the effectiveness of these interfaces in conveying information to software engineers. In this paper, we discuss some concepts and guidelines regarding the requirements of visualization tools for software comprehension as well as the set-up of an infrastructure to empirically evaluate how useful are those tools in supporting software comprehension activities.