Integrating abstraction flexibility with diverse program perspectives

Abstract

Technically, because of the limited dimensions of the presentation media, and psychologically, because of the limited human attention span, graphical program visualization in computer assisted reverse engineering becomes increasingly difficult with scale. This problem becomes compounded when multi-perspective visualization is taken into consideration. In this research we present a system called HVIEW, which attempts to overcome the problem of scale by logical decomposition. HVIEW can present a graphical visual of a computer program at various abstraction levels from diverse perspectives as interactively requested by the user. HVIEW logically formulates abstract function and data objects to construct compressed immediate program representations and organizes them into independent data and function hierarchies. Whereas, these hierarchies provide the mechanism of flexible abstraction, a user specifiable query filter creates an assortment of perspectives on the rendered visual of the modelled code.<>