Scalable visualisations with ownership trees

Ownership trees are a simple yet powerful method of extracting an object-oriented program's implicit aggregation structure from its object graph. The topology of a program's ownership tree is independent of scale object-oriented programs are constructed from objects, and the relationship between a whole system and its top-level components is the same as the relationship between a low-level data structure and the objects that implement it. Because of this independence, a software visualisation tool based on ownership trees is applicable at all levels of abstraction within a program's design. Visualising ownership trees can support learning and teaching about object-oriented programs, as well as debugging and maintaining them.