Representing and Integrating Dynamic Collaborations in IDEs

Static views of object-oriented source code as presented in a development environment (IDE) do not provide explicit representations of dynamic collaboration to describe how source artifacts communicate at runtime. Direct access within an IDE to explicit representations of dynamic collaborations would provide developers with useful insights into a system´s behavior. In this paper we describe how we seamlessly integrate novel interactive visual representations of dynamic collaborations between static artifacts to complement traditional static concepts within the IDE. We motivate our work and introduce our enhancements in our prototype IDE Hermion and provide validation for our work by means of case studies and benchmarks.