A Case Study in Evaluating the Usefulness of the Run-Time Structure During Coding Tasks

Diagrams can help with program understanding and code modification tasks. Today, many tools extract diagrams of packages, classes, associations and dependencies. However, during coding activities, developers often ask questions about objects and relations between objects, i.e., the run-time structure. Most tools that display the run-time structure show only partial views based on running the system. In previous work, the authors proposed extracting diagrams of the run-time structure using static analysis. In this paper, they investigate whether developers who have access to such diagrams of the run-time structure can perform a code modification task more effectively than developers who have access to diagrams of only the code structure.