Software Visualization Tools for Software Comprehension

Abstract

Softwares are getting ever bigger and complex. Complete software comprehension is important in all streams of software engineering - forward, reverse, round-trip, and reengineering. Software systems are by nature invisible which differs from tangible products. As the size and complexity of software systems increase, a complete comprehensive understanding of software becomes a challenging task. Researchers believe that the key to this problem is better visualization. Better software visualization enables better software comprehension. Although the program comprehension has been emphasized dominantly in research literature in the field of reverse software engineering, software comprehension is less emphasized and should be distinguished from program comprehension, considering software is a collection of programs. Software comprehension should be treated as comprehending the whole software and its underlying program components rather than just segments of code or algorithms. This paper attempts to explore the concepts of software visualization, existing software visualization tools, techniques, methodologies, and finally concentrates on software visualization aspects and means of visualization for software comprehension.