A new generation of CLASS BLUEPRINT

Agouf, Nour Jihene; Ducasse, Stéphane; Etien, Anne; Lanza, Michele

doi:10.1109/VISSOFT55257.2022.00012

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Conference paper (in proceedings)

A new generation of CLASS BLUEPRINT

Agouf, Nour Jihene Arolla and Univ. Lille, CNRS, Inria, Université Lille, Lille, France
Ducasse, Stéphane Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL, Université Lille, Lille, France
Etien, Anne Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL, Université Lille, Lille, France
Lanza, Michele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera

2022

Published in:

2022 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). - 2022, p. 29-39

English In object-oriented programming, classes are the primary abstraction mechanism used by and exposed to developers. Understanding classes is key for the development and evolution of object-oriented applications. The fundamental problem faced by developers is that while classes are intrinsically structured entities, in IDEs they are represented as a blob of text. The idea behind the original CLASS BLUEPRINT visualization was to represent the internal structure of classes in terms of fields, their accesses, and the method call flow. Additional information was depicted using colors. The thus created visualization proved to be an effective means to support program comprehension. However, a number of omissions rendered it only partially useful. We propose CLASS BLUEPRINT V2 (in short BLUEPRINTV2), which in addition to the information depicted by CLASS BLUEPRINT also supports dead code identification, methods under tests, and calling relationships between class and instance level methods. In addition, BLUEPRINTV2 enhances the understanding of fields by showing how fields of super/subclasses are accessed. We present the enhanced visualization and report on a first validation with 26 developers and 18 projects.

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