VizMe: An Annotation-Based Program Visualization System Generating a Compact Visualization

Abstract

As the scale of software is getting large and complex, the development cost of software scales up to lots of man-months. The maintenance cost of complex software is also increasing and it is usually more than the development cost. Understanding the underlying logic and modifying the actual code consume most part of the maintenance. However, the first step, say the understanding of codes, is extremely hard for even professional developers especially when the code to modify is written by other programmers. Though several visualization methods, such as flowcharts and NS-charts, have been proposed up to now, it is still practically hard to adopt such methods in a real analysis of an existing code because the complexity of the code results in complex visualization results. The complexity of these results hinders the developers in drawing them directly or even in taking a look of them. This paper introduces VizMe, an automatic visualization tool generating a compact visualization. The key of the compact visualization is the adoption of the meta-tags, the annotations attributed to the code blocks. VizMe accepts the source code written in C, Java, or Scheme and produces the visual output including flowcharts, PADs (problem analysis diagrams), and pseudo codes.