Graph Expression for Various Software Documents As Unified Format

Abstract

We are developing an educational environment system named VRale-SCM to foster IT engineers necessary for the recent information society. VRale-SCM allows students to deepen their understanding by viewing source code and class diagrams in a virtual space. In this paper, we examined the possibility of using graphs to represent not only source code and class diagrams but also various software documents generated during the software development lifecycle as a framework for viewing them in a virtual space. While there have been attempts to represent individual software documents using a graph, there have been no attempts to represent relationships among these software documents. It will become possible to trace their relationships by interconnecting them, which is expected to facilitate the understanding of the students. In this paper, we shall examine the composition of some of the software documents in each process and attempt to represent the source code and design patterns in the graphs. We shall also check them with visualization tools. Using the graph representation is expected to contribute to understanding by presenting various metrics by applying the analysis in existing studies.