Project Information

Introduction

My DREU project area is visualization software. More specifically, I am working to develop a visualization plug-in for Java Eclipse called VisCG.

Edit 8/6/14: Here's my final report on VisCG!

Application

With more and more developers learning to program, programs have grown in complexity. There is a growing need for useful methods to understand algorithms and find errors in code. This is where my team's project comes in. VisCG is an Eclipse plug-in that visualizes a weighted call graph of a target program. Basically what this means is that it takes an Eclipse project and makes a neat little graph with nodes representing methods and edges representing the method calls. Using this graph, developers can understand the structure of their programs more easily than if they relied solely on the code.

sorry!

Problem And Action Plan

VisCG is still a work in progress. There are still bugs to fix and features to add. The implementation plan includes:

  • verifying whether all functions/edges are displayed
  • making sure there is little to no overlap of nodes
  • implementing node removal
  • implementing one-way navigation from the graph to the source code
  • implementing curved edges
  • renaming the classes and packages to more intuitive names
  • dealing with multiple calls to the same method
  • dealing with overloaded methods (same identifier, different parameters)
  • accessing the library
  • display task specific graphs
  • zooming in or out
  • provide expandable nodes
  • assign weights to each edge

    • If this is all finished in time, our team will carry out user studies to see how effective and useful the plug-in is for actual users. For updates on the project, check out the Progress page!