Stacksplorer: call graph navigation helps increasing code maintenance efficiency
Abstract
We present Stacksplorer, a new tool to support source code navigation and comprehension. Stacksplorer computes the call graph of a given piece of code, visualizes relevant parts of it, and allows developers to interactively traverse it. This augments the traditional code editor by offering an additional layer of navigation. Stacksplorer is particularly useful to understand and edit unknown source code because branches of the call graph can be explored and backtracked easily. Visualizing the callers of a method reduces the risk of introducing unintended side effects. In a quantitative study, programmers using Stacksplorer performed three of four software maintenance tasks significantly faster and with higher success rates, and Stacksplorer received a System Usability Scale rating of 85.4 from participants.
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Software engineering researchers have produced tools that help reduce developers' navigation costs.
“These and other findings about developers' foraging and navigations (e.g., [26,31,37,44]) have led software engineering researchers to produce tools that help to reduce developers' navigation costs as they look for the information they need [8,17,18,19,22,30,33,43].”
From Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost (2016) · cites this paper as [18]
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- Authors
- Karrer, T., Krämer, J.-P., Diehl, J., Hartmann, B., & Borchers, J.
- Affiliations
- RWTH Aachen University (DE)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2011-10-16
- Pages
- 217-224
- OpenAlex
- W1967932767
- Cited by
- 48
- References
- 25
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 2 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 4
- FWCI
- 2.88
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- RWTH Aachen University
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Data Visualization and Analytics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- call graph, source code navigation, program comprehension, interactive visualization, software maintenance, usability
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