Program visualization through visual metaphors

Abstract

Program understanding is of major importance for software developers. This defines the demand for on-the fly inspection and analysis tools to understand the behavior of software. This paper describes an approach based on virtual reality for visualization of program activity. The solution shows that VR can substantially support the users' understanding by providing suitable graphical representations. The main difference of this approach compared to traditional program analysis tools is the usage of metaphors instead of common textual or 2D graphical displays.