Program comprehension through multiple simultaneous views: a session with VinEd

Abstract

Program comprehension is a hard cognitive task that can be promoted by the use of views, i.e., automatically created concrete representations of a program revealing different aspects of its structure and behavior. VinEd is a view-based editor that allows users to add their own views to the system. The paper analyzes the VinEd approach by presenting a scenario of a session where VinEd is used in a comprehension task. The scenario is analyzed from a cognitive point of view. The VinEd approach is also evaluated using two requirement lists proposed for software exploration tools.