Graph Buddy — an interactive code dependency browsing and visualization tool

Abstract

We present scg-cli, a command line tool facilitating software comprehension. The tool extracts semantic information about code structure and dependencies from the Java and Scala projects, and structures it as a Semantic Code Graph (SCG), an information model underlying scg-cli. The SCG data, once written into a portable, open protobuf-based format, can be used by the scg-cli command line tool to obtain project metrics, find the most critical code entities, and compute project partitionings. The results of this analysis and the SCG data can be exported for further investigation by external tools such as Gephi software (visualization) and, notably, as a Jupyter Notebook environment with helper APIs to enable advanced analysis of the project using data analytics methods. We explain functionalities of the scg-cli tool and demonstrate its capabilities by showing an example analysis of an open-source Java project commons-io.

Semantic Code Graph—An Information Model to Facilitate Software Comprehension

“…Software networks are extensively used to facilitate software comprehension and maintenance through software architecture recovery [13], [25], finding key entities [10], [38], [62], [63], code modularization [60], [64], [65], finding code similarities [66], code visualization [67]- [69], and tracking code evolution [70].…”

“…The SCG was utilized in this way in Graph Buddy 39 , a code browsing and visualization tool (Figure 19). Answering reachability questions and documenting parts of the system with Graph Buddy was described in detail in [69]. 39 https://github.com/VirtusLab/graphbuddy Using Graph Buddy, developers could complete typical code browsing tasks in a more convenient way than using features available in popular IDEs.…”

“…Conclusions. SCG-powered interactive visualization was described in detail in our previous work [69], where we also presented its quantitative evaluation. To this end, we asked ten programmers to complete three programming tasks using Graph Buddy, all involving the metals project : (1) finding a specific call hierarchy, (2) finding a call path, (3) learning about a specific code entity.…”

Collaborative Software Visualization for Program Comprehension

“…This also applies to more recent and often collaboratively usable virtual reality approaches [37]- [41]. Other publications present different use cases for embedded SV in code editors, such as dependency browsing [42] or sketching [43], [44]. Few approaches enable developers to modify source code via embedded code editors [45].…”