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Butterflies: A Visual Approach to Characterize Packages
Como, Italy September 19-September 22
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/METRICS.2005.1511th IEEE International Software Metr ...
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Stéphane Ducasse, University of Bern
Michele Lanza, University of Lugano
Laura Ponisio, University of Bern
Understanding sets of classes, or packages, is an important activity in the development and reengineering of large object-oriented systems. Packages represent the coarse-grained structure of an application. They are artefacts to deploy and structure software, and therefore more than a simple generalization of classes. The relationships between packages and their contained classes are key in the decomposition of an application and its (re)-modularisation. However, it is difficult to quickly grasp the structure of a package and to understand how a package interacts with the rest of the system. We tackle this problem using butterfly visualizations, i.e., dedicated radar charts built from simple package metrics based on a language-independent meta-model. We illustrate our approach on two applications and show how we can retrieve the relevant characteristics of packages.
Index Terms:
Program understanding, package metrics, reverse engineering, software visualization
Citation:
Stéphane Ducasse, Michele Lanza, Laura Ponisio, "Butterflies: A Visual Approach to Characterize Packages," metrics, pp.7, 11th IEEE International Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS'05), 2005
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