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10th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'03)   p. 154
Re-documenting, Visualizing and Understanding Software System Using DocLike Viewer
Shahida Sulaiman, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Minden, Pulau Pinang; Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur
Norbik Bashah Idris, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur
Shamsul Sahibuddin, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor
Sarina Sulaiman, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor

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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/APSEC.2003.1254368
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Abstract
Visualizing the artifacts of a software system graphically has proven to improve the cognitive strategies and understanding of the subject system by programmers. This is more crucial when they need to maintain a software system with out-dated documentation or without system documentation at all. Many tools have emerged and they predominantly consist of a reverse engineering environment and a viewer to visualize software artifacts such as in the form of graphs. The tools also grant structural re-documentation of existing software system but they do not directly utilize document-like software visualization in their approaches. This paper proposes DocLike Modularized Graph (DMG) method that represents the software architectures of a reverse engineered subject system graphically in a modularized and standardized document-like manner. To realize this method, we have built a prototype tool called DocLike Viewer that enables a user to re-document, visualize and comprehend a subject system written in C language that is parsed by an existing parser. From the experiment conducted we found that our method managed to statistically improve cognition of a subject system in terms of productivity and quality to solve certain types of maintenance tasks.
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Citation:  Shahida Sulaiman, Norbik Bashah Idris, Shamsul Sahibuddin, Sarina Sulaiman, "Re-documenting, Visualizing and Understanding Software System Using DocLike Viewer," apsec, p. 154,  10th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'03),  2003