A Comparative Evaluation of Dynamic Visualisation Tools
نویسندگان
چکیده
Despite their potential applications in software comprehension, it appears that dynamic visualisation tools are seldom used outside the research laboratory. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of five dynamic visualisation tools AVID, Jinsight, jRMTool, Together ControlCenter diagrams and Together ControlCenter debugger. The tools were evaluated on a number of general software comprehension and specific reverse engineering tasks using the HotDraw objectoriented framework. The tasks considered typical comprehension issues, including identification of software structure and behaviour, design pattern extraction, extensibility potential, maintenance issues, functionality location, and runtime load. The results revealed that the level of abstraction employed by a tool affects its success in different tasks, and that tools were more successful in addressing specific reverse engineering tasks than general software comprehension activities. It was found that no one tool performs well in all tasks, and some tasks were beyond the capabilities of all five tools. This paper concludes with suggestions for improving the efficacy of such tools.
منابع مشابه
Visualization of production area information: How important is a 3D-Visualization?
A key objective in designing human-computer interfaces in the field of industrial manufacturing should be the dynamic visualisation of manufacturing processes with help of innovative visualisation elements. This article describes a comparative evaluation study of two ways of visualising complex shop floor activities in real-time: a traditional twodimensional, windows-based form of visualisation...
متن کاملCharacterisation and Showcasing of Network Visualisation Approaches for Command and Control
Network Visualisation technologies are becoming more relevant in Command and Control environments to help cope with the increased complexity of defence operations. A significant number of Network Visualisation technologies are currently available so the choice of a particular approach to support specific C2 tasks can be difficult. This paper describes an approach for characterising Network Visu...
متن کاملInformed Spatial Decision Making Using Coordinated Views
According to a commonly accepted view, the process of decision making comprises three major phases: intelligence (situation analysis and problem recognition), design (finding possible variants of problem solution), and choice (evaluation of the options and selection of the most appropriate ones). It is widely recognised that exploratory data visualisation is very helpful during the first phase ...
متن کاملTowards Visual Data Mining
In this paper, we present our work in a new data mining approach called Visual Data Mining (VDM). This new approach tries to involve the user (being the data expert not a data mining or analysis specialist) more intensively in the data mining process and to increase the part of the visualisation in this process. The visualisation part can be increased with cooperative tools: the visualisation i...
متن کاملEvaluation of Low-Level Program Visualisation for Teaching Novice C Programmers
While several program visualisation tools aimed at novice programmers have been developed over the past decade there is little empirical evidence showing that novices actually benefit from their use [3]. Bradman [7] is a low-level program visualisation tool. We present an experiment that tests the efficacy of Bradman in assisting novice programmers learn programming concepts. We show that stude...
متن کامل