Assessing GRASP utilization through instrumentation

Abstract

The idea that representing something visually can help us understand it has long been promoted in common practice and in the literature [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Indeed, "a picture is worth a thousand words" has become a standard cliché in our culture. In the case of software, however, one must take great care that it is the correct thousand words that are being conveyed [5]. Nonetheless, appropriate visualizations of software can be quite beneficial to programmers, especially when faced with program comprehension tasks. Such tasks exist throughout the software life cycle (e.g., formal technical reviews, debugging, verification, reverse engineering) and in the classroom (e.g., students reading examples from the text or examples from the professor).The GRASP (Graphical Representations of Algorithms, Structures, and Processes) research project at Auburn University seeks to develop tools and techniques for the effective use of graphical representations and visualizations of software. The overall goal of this research is to increase the efficiency of programmer comprehension and understanding of source code, and thereby decrease overall software cost. As an integral part of the research project, the GRASP software engineering tool has been developed as a continuously evolving prototype. The emphasis of the tool to this point has been on visualizing program structure and complexity via the automatic generation of Control Structure Diagrams (CSDs) and Complexity Profile Graphs (CPGs) from Ada source code [7]. The current release of GRASP provides generation of CSDs and CPGs together with other program comprehension aids such as syntax coloring, typographical enhancements, and source code folding [8]. When coupled with an appropriate compilation system such as GNAT, GRASP becomes an integrated graphical development environment for Ada 95, allowing users to edit, visualize, pretty-print, compile, link, execute and debug Ada software.The GRASP prototype for Ada was first made available to the public in January 1996. Since that time, thousands of copies of GRASP have been downloaded via anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP) and the World Wide Web (WWW) from educational, government, military and commercial sites, both in the United States and abroad. When it was released to the public, GRASP was also made available to users of the Auburn University College of Engineering computer network. GRASP is now used extensively throughout the computer science and engineering curriculum at Auburn University, in approximately three to five courses per quarter.