Interactive User-Oriented Views for Better Understanding Software Systems

Understanding software artefacts is a crucial task for people who want to participate in any software development process. However, because of the large amount of detailed and scattered information in software artefacts, understanding them is usually time-consuming and vulnerable to human errors and subjectivities. A system that aids practitioners to investigate understanding about software artefacts could reduce the vulnerabilities and speed up software development/maintenance process. Our research focuses on building a comprehensive view of software system in order for developers to achieve the two goals: (i) to save the time spending on searching and navigating on source code; and (ii) to gain better understanding about software artefacts regarding to domain-specific tasks. To achieve these goals, we propose an emprical approach in which the visualisation and the generation of high-level design and architectural views from source code and design documentations have been played central roles. The research is on-going and could potentially be extended to di↵erent software artefacts (such as requirements, use-cases, test-cases, revision logs).