vizSlice: Visualizing Large Scale Software Slices

Abstract

Program slicing has long been used to facilitate program understanding. Several approaches have been suggested for computing slices based on different perspectives, including forward slicing, backward slicing, static slicing, and dynamic slicing. The applications of slicing are numerous, including testing, effort estimation, and impact analysis. Surprisingly, given the maturity of slicing, few approaches exist for visualizing slices. In this paper, we present our tool for visualizing large systems based on program slicing and through two visualization idioms: treemaps and bipartite graphs. In particular, we use treemaps to facilitate slicing-based navigation, and we use bipartite graphs to facilitate visual impact analysis by displaying relationships among system decomposition slices showing the relevant computations involving a given slicing variable. We believe our tool will support various software maintenance tasks, including providing analysts an interactive visualization of the impact of potential changes, thus allowing them to plan maintenance accordingly. Finally, we show that, through the use of both existing scalable slicing and scalable visualization approaches, our tool can facilitate analysis of large software systems.