Abstract
Muchos investigadores han señalado la falta de estudios empíricos que sistemáticamente examinen las ventajas y desventajas del uso de técnicas de visualización para soportar la comprensión del software. Estos estudios son indispensables para recolectar y analizar evidencia objetiva y cuantificable acerca de la utilidad de las técnicas de visualización y herramientas propuestas, y más aún, para servir como guía de la investigación en visualización de software. En este estudio, 6 tareas típicas de comprensión de software fueron realizadas por 20 estudiantes de un curso de ingeniería de software. Se midió el tiempo de respuesta y se calificó la exactitud en las respuestas de los participantes. Los resultados indican que, por una parte, el uso de la técnica de visualización basada en grafos mejoró la exactitud en las respuestas de los estudiantes (21.45% en promedio); por otra parte, no se encontró evidencia significativa de reducción en el tiempo gastado por los estudiantes para resolver las tareas de comprensión de software.
Highlights
In order to analyze and understand large-scale software systems several techniques have been developed and one of the most interesting is software visualization
The main factor being analyzed is the usefulness of the graph-based visualization technique, which in this case is implemented in the ISPACE tool2 against the typical code-based exploration by using Eclipse IDE3
The effect of the technique on completion time is illustrated in Figure 4. 4.3 Tasks Analysis we provide a deeper analysis of the results for each task
Summary
In order to analyze and understand large-scale software systems several techniques have been developed and one of the most interesting is software visualization. This approach takes advantage of the human’s brain ability to recognize and understand graphic patterns and images and has been extensively used by many researchers to propose a wide variety of techniques and supporting tools. Among the existing empirical evaluation of software visualization tools, most controlled experiments are dedicated to the validation of the tools developed by the authors of those studies. This study presents a controlled experiment aimed at evaluating an independent graph-based visualization technique, not developed by the authors.
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