Comprehensive software understanding with SEXTANT

Current tools for software understanding mostly concentrate on one comprehension technique, e.g., visualization, or bottom-up navigation through software elements via hyperlinks. In this paper, we argue that to effectively assist developers in understanding today´s software systems, a combination of several comprehension techniques is needed including seamless integration of top-down querying and bottom-up navigation strategies that work across different kinds of software artifacts; furthermore, application-domain and/or technology specific relationships between software elements should be taken into consideration; last but not least, a tight integration of such tools into development environments is crucial. We present SEXTANT, a software exploration tool tightly integrated into the Eclipse IDE that satisfies these requirements. In two case studies, we demonstrate how SEXTANT´s features are conducive in tracking down the source of erroneous behavior, respectively, in discovering ´bad smells´ in the software structure which should lead to code refactorings.