Evaluating the usefulness of software visualization in supporting software comprehension activities

Modern IDEs offer built-in support for developing plug-ins. More recently, we have seen a growing number of plug-ins that offer non-conventional software visualization interfaces. They usually aim to help programmers to understand unfamiliar source code by representing it in visual structures such as trees, scatter-plots or graphs. Although very attractive visually, we need to know more about the effectiveness of these interfaces in conveying information to software engineers. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to empirically evaluate how useful are non-conventional visual paradigms in supporting software comprehension activities. The results for the first pilot study indicated that our experimental environment was consistent and could move to a full scale controlled experiment.