Extendable Object Visualisation for Software Programming

This paper describes a reengineering tool which assists the process of understanding the functionality of unknown software, particularly object oriented programs. In contrast to many other tools which analyse the source code, the inspected program is analysed at runtime by a concurrent process running in parallel. Information on all objects allocated by the inspected program is collected, in particular the dynamic type of each inspected object is determined. In contrast to the static type, the dynamic type of an object can only be determined at runtime. Each object is visualised by a corresponding visualisation class. Visualisation classes for well known data structures like binary trees can be used from the beginning. New visualisation can be derived by class extensions or can be added simply. The inspected program can be halted at specific locations to update the visualisation. Also, updating the visualisation can be triggered by specifying watch points.