Improving Source Code Locality

Developers working with source code have a strong sense of locality defined by both the modularity of the system and the development environment. For a particular change task some subset of the system will be relevant, and when that subset is not a localized subset, it can be difficult for the developer to identify the relevant entities and to understand how they fit together. This is due to an effect sometimes called cognitive tunnel vision. We propose to study and formalize this notion of locality for software development and produce an interactive visualization that supports a more flexible locality based on navigation activity and multiple relationship types. This should make relevant entities more localized and easier to identify and work with.