Proposing a visual approach to support the characterization of software comprehension activities

Modern IDE provides several resources to visually represent and explore the software. Nonetheless, there is limited empirical evidence of how those resources are utilized in specific software engineering activities. This has led to several studies to characterize the usage of IDE resources. The majority of these studies rely on methods that are costly and time consuming. This paper proposes a visual approach to help the characterization of IDE usage during software maintenance activities. It works by gathering data for all primitive operations performed by the programmers on the IDE, registering it in a log file and presenting the information abstracted from this log in an interactive visual interface. The interface transforms the fine-grained log data into meaningful information to represent how programmers use the IDE resources.