Scalable interfaces to support program comprehension

The effectiveness of control structure diagrams in source code comprehension activities

“…Experimentation is also needed to address the interaction of visualizations with various cognitive models of program comprehension [43], [27], [12]. Pennington [30] asserts that programmers attempt to comprehend source code in a bottom-up fashion.…”

“…Their work indicates the importance of tools to support comprehension tasks at both high levels of abstraction (e.g., architecture) and lower levels of abstraction (e.g., source code). Citrin et al [12], however, report the difficulty in providing visualizations at both high and low levels of abstraction and point out the need for scalable visualizations.…”

VIPR and the Visual Programming Challenge

“…VIPR is a graphical transformation language developed to avoid the problems of scalability and detail in context encountered by some other visual languages [2,6,7,12]. It is an imperative language that uses the Tcl scripting language for statements and expressions, and visual constructs for its control, including procedures [4,5].…”

“…This containment-based approach can be summed up as "Follow the rings deeper into the nest". Containment, or nesting, is used to build programs that do no suffer from the graph edge problem [6,7].…”

“…VIPR's environment supports animated execution. VIPR attempts to address the issue of scalability in visual languages through the use of zooming and fish-eyeing [6,7]. These features were added with the goal of enabling rapid construction of solutions.…”