Blaze

Understanding source code is crucial for successful software maintenance. To understand source code, navigation in the call graph has been shown to be particularly important. Programmers often employ a two-phased strategy for effective call graph exploration. We present Blaze, a source code exploration tool designed to explicitly support this strategy. In a study, we show that call graph exploration tools significantly increase success rates in typical software maintenance tasks and that using Blaze significantly reduces task completion times compared to using the Call Hierarchy or Xcode.