An experimental platform to characterize software comprehension activities supported by visualization

Software visualization has been pointed out as one of the solutions to overcome challenges that programmers face in understanding unfamiliar source code. Our work proposes an extensible multi-view software visualization infrastructure implemented as an Eclipse plug-in called SourceMiner. It allows programmers to perform tasks supported by visualization interfaces provided by the IDE. A querying view is integrated into the tool, allowing for the dynamic filtering of the modules rendered into the visualization interfaces. The whole infrastructure is conceived as an experimental platform. All actions performed by the programmer are captured in a log file. This facilitates the analysis of the IDE usage while programmers are performing specific software engineering tasks.