Providing enhanced visual support for software development and maintenance

Abstract

GRASP is a robust software engineering tool that has been enhanced and improved to production quality through several earlier prototypes. The primary emphasis of the tool is on providing automatic visualization of software control structure and complexity to support development, maintenance, reverse engineering, and reengineering. GRASP has the potential to be a valuable point tool in any environment where source code is expected to be either written or read. GRASP has been extended to multiple languages such as C, C++, Java, Ada 95, and VHDL.. This paper describes the unique features of GRASP, its intended uses, and discusses promising avenues offuture research.

The role of software measures and metrics in studies of program comprehension

“…The primary investigative tool used for these experiments is a development environment for Ada 95, Java, C, C++, and VHDL known as GRASP (Graphical Representation of Algorithms, Structures, and Processes) [7].…”

On the importance of syntax coloring for teaching statistics

“…in the program. Syntax highlighting is merely secondary notation or a cognitive dimension (Green 1989; Green and Petre 1996) that provides perceptual cues for humans regarding the syntax and thus improves the readability of the code (Hendrix et al 1998; Cross et al 1999; Baecker and Marcus 1989). Consequently, it helps one to write syntactically correct programs (Myers, Pane, and Ko 2004) and improves program comprehension (Gilmore and Green 1988; Kankuzi and Ayalew 2008).…”