The SEXTANT Software Exploration Tool

Author

Schafer, Thorsten ; Eichberg, Michael ; Haupt, Michael ; Mezini, Mira

Author_Institution

Software Technol. Group, Darmstadt Univ. of Technol.

Volume

32

Issue

9

fYear

2006

Firstpage

753

Lastpage

768

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a set of functional requirements for software exploration tools and provide initial evidence that various combinations of these features are needed to effectively assist developers in understanding software. We observe that current tools for software exploration only partly support these features. This has motivated the development of SEXTANT, a software exploration tool tightly integrated into the Eclipse IDE that has been developed to fill this gap. By means of case studies, we demonstrate how the requirements fulfilled by SEXTANT are conducive to an understanding needed to perform a maintenance task

Keywords

formal specification; program visualisation; programming environments; reverse engineering; software maintenance; Eclipse IDE; SEXTANT software exploration tool; functional requirement; program comprehension; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software understanding; software visualization; Cognition; Computer architecture; Navigation; Reverse engineering; Software maintenance; Software tools; Visualization; Software exploration; program comprehension; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software visualization.;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TSE.2006.94

Filename

1707671