Design recovery of real-time graphical applications using video

Abstract

We propose an approach to design recovery of real-time graphical applications - such as flight simulators and games - that uses video to link lower-level code events with their higher-level graphical manifestations. Such a link can be used for both top-down and bottom-up design recovery. Top-down, one can identify an interesting visual event in the video and then see which lower-level code event(s) are responsible for it. Bottom-up, one can explain code of interest by seeing the sorts of high-level visual events in the video to which that code corresponds. The link between low-level code events and high-level visual events can be established by inspection or through an automated technique. As an example of the latter, clicking on a falling creature in the video would yield code specific to the falling creature - excluding irrelevant code from other walking/climbing creatures at that same moment in the video. We shall demonstrate by example how our design recovery method sheds light on the design of real-time graphical applications.