Title :
H-CURVE: A Simple Visualizing Method of Source Code
Author :
Bae, Min-Jung ; Ji, Jeong-Hoon ; Woo, Gyun
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Eng., Pusan Nat. Univ., Busan
Abstract :
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.
Keywords :
Hilbert spaces; data visualisation; software metrics; H-CURVE; Hilbert curve; software engineering; software metrics; software visualization; source code; Data visualization; Displays; Fractals; Information technology; Software engineering; Software metrics; Software systems; Software tools; Strips; Unified modeling language; Hilbert diagram; Software metrics; Visualization;
Conference_Titel :
Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology, 2008. ICCIT '08. Third International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Busan
Print_ISBN :
978-0-7695-3407-7
DOI :
10.1109/ICCIT.2008.269