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    STUDIA INFORMATICA - Issue no. Sp. Issue 1 / 2014  
         
  Article:   VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUES OF COMPONENTS FOR LARGE LEGACY C/C++ SOFTWARE.

Authors:  . 		 
       
         
  Abstract:   C and C++   languages are widely used for software development in various industries including Information Technology, Telecommunication and Transportation since the 80-ies. Over this four decade, companieshave built up a huge software legacy. In many cases these programs become inherently complicated by implementing complex features (such as OS kernels or databases), and consisting several millions lines of code. During the extended development time, not only the size of the software increases, but a large number (i.e. hundreds) of programmers get involved in the project. Mainly due to these two factors, the maintenance of these software products becomes more and more time consuming and costly.To handle the above mentioned complexity issue, companies apply software comprehension tools to help in the navigation and visualization of the legacy code. In our article we present a visualization methodology that assists programmers in the process of comprehending the functional dependencies of artifacts in a C++   source. Our novel graph representation not only reveals the connections between C/C++   implementation fi les, headers and binaries, but also visualizes the relationships between larger software components - e.g directories -, and provides a method for architecture compliance checking. The applied technique does not require any modifi cation or documentation of the source code, hence it solely relies on the compiler generated Abstract Syntax Tree and the build information to analyze the legacy software.

2010 Mathematics Subject Classifi cation. 68N99. 1998 CR Categories and Descriptors. I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling - Object hierarchies.

Key words and phrases. code comprehension, software maintenance, static analysis, component visualization, graph representation, functional dependency
 
         
     
         
         
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