Automated Comprehension Tasks in Software Exploration

Finding issues in software usually requires a series of comprehension tasks. After every task, an engineer explores the results and decides whether further tasks are required. Software comprehension therefore is a combination of tasks and a supported exploration of the results typically in an adequate visualization. In this paper, we describe how we simplify the combination of existing automated procedures to sequentially solve common software comprehension tasks. Beyond that we improve the understanding of the outcomes with interactive and explorative visualization concepts in a time efficient workflow. We validate the presented concept with basic comprehension tasks in an extended CocoViz tool implementation.