Visualizing programs using graphs

Abstract

Graphs seem to be a natural way to represent various aspects of program execution, and therefore, graphs are commonly used by software visualization to display, interpret, document and convey the static and dynamic nature of program execution. The major obstacles which must be considered before graphs can be used in software visualization tools, are the conceptual problems, that is, the difficulty of the interpretation of a graph by a user, and the display problems, that is, the difficulties in handling large graphs and drawing dynamically changing graphs on the display. In this paper, we show a set of techniques which together overcome the complexity of large graphs, their display, and the handling of the dynamic changes in graphs. We demonstrate these techniques based on a variety of tools which were developed in the past.