Graphical support for code-level software understanding

Understanding of a software system is a prerequisite to any significant maintenance activity, and this understanding must ultimately extend to the source code itself This activity is difficult to support because of its highly interactive nature and the fact that code understanding is generally built up over time. This paper describes the Interactive Code Understanding Environment (ICUE, pronounced “IQ”), a graphical environment that supports the exploration of code and code relationships and allows the capture of significant relationships in the form of reusable graphical diagrams. ICUE provides a user with the ability to query a comprehensive code database generated from source code, view the results of queries in the form of graphs, interactively expand the graphs, hide unwanted information in several ways, and examine source code easily and directly from the graphs. ICUE also provides a mechanism for annotating, saving and manipulating these graphs to facilitate the capture of code-level software understanding as a library of such annotated graphs