H-CURVE: A Simple Visualizing Method of Source Code

It is a difficult and time-consuming task to understand the source code of a complex program, even for programming experts. Software metrics or software visualization is being used for analyzing the structure of a program. Software metrics provides a way to calculate the complexity of a source code in a numeric value. And, software visualization displays the structure of a program to a geometrical diagram. However, in order to understand the results of these methods, the user should be acquainted with basic knowledge of software engineering. This paper suggests a simple visualization method which is based on Hilbert curve, a well-known fractal filling a square. The visualization result can be presented in different levels of details with the control flow of a program. Further, we suggested a method to measure the complexity of the visualization result. According to the experimental results, the correlation between the complexity of the H-CURVE diagram and the execution time of programs is in a meaningful range.