Empirical study assessing the impact of SeeIT 3D on comprehension

Abstract

Software visualizations are meant to help developers comprehend software systems. They are especially useful for large software systems with tens of thousands of classes.There have been many visualizations been proposed in the literature with relatively little empirical evidence showing their usefulness to developers. In this thesis, we conduct an empirical study to assess the impact a software visualization tool namely, SeeIT 3D (an Eclipse plug-in) has on performance of certain software tasks. Six different tasks in three different task categories, developed in the context of understanding an open-source system, GanttProject, written in Java. Ninety-seven subjects were recruited rom three different universities and split into two groups; one group used the SeeIT 3D plug-in while the other did not use the plug-in. The main goal was to determine the impact and added benefit of SeeIT 3D while performing typical software tasks within the Eclipse IDE. Results indicate SeeIT 3D performs significantly better in one task category namely overview tasks. There is also a significant difference in the way experts and novices solve tasks. These results indicate when software visualization tools are useful for developers. They might not be useful for all tasks but are worthwhile for others.