genDMG: A generic graph representation layout to visualize existing software artifacts

Abstract

Examining software artifacts of an existing software system to understand their functionalities based on source codes can be a very daunting task. Many tools have emerged to assist software understanding or program comprehension, which normally consist of graph representations in a reverse engineering environment. These tools are known as reverse engineering or software visualization tools. This paper describes a document-like and modularized software visualization method called generic DocLike Modularized Graph (genDMG) that employs a graph drawing technique to represent software artifacts written either in structured or object-oriented. An example illustrates how the graph representations could assist software maintainers' program comprehension. A comparative study shows genDMG can improve what other methods could support in software visualization. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.