Visualizing the UI impact of Methods for Program Comprehension

Abstract

Software developers spend 58% of their time comprehending source code. Most methods to support this task are limited to providing abstract views on a system’s building blocks and connections. However, this perspective is fundamentally different to the user view on a running software system. Indeed, it was found in a study that developers working with UI systems use the UI as a starting point to comprehend the software. However, there is a lack of techniques that help developers to map user view to the source code. We developed a first simple prototype to automatically generate documentation that includes links to the user view and performed a qualitative user study with 24 participants. The results indicate the feasibility of the development of such prototype and provide insights into perceived advantages and limitations. This indicate that this research direction has the potential to change the way we understand software in future.