Slicito: Using Computational Notebooks for Program Comprehension

Abstract:

Although integrated development environments provide developers with code structure analysis tools, program comprehension tasks still require significant manual effort. A promising direction to solve this problem is Moldable Development, a way of programming which encourages developers to build custom program visualization tools during software development process. To foster this practice within the .NET development community, we provide a tool called SLICITO, capable of analyzing and visualizing a C# program structure in a highly configurable way. Since SLICITO is implemented as an extension to computational notebooks, it takes advantage of their interactivity and visualization principles used for data analysis, and applies them in the field of program comprehension. In contrast to similar tools for C#, SLICITO is more flexible and provides more detailed information in code inspection. Its usage is shown in a video located at https://www.slicito.com/icpc video.mp4.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{husak_slicito_2023,
    title = {{Slicito: Using Computational Notebooks for Program Comprehension}},
    author = {Husák, Robert and Kofroň , Jan and Zavoral, Filip},
    year = {2023},
    booktitle = {{2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)}},
    doi = {10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00019},
    pages = {64--68},
    shorttitle = {Slicito},
}

Proceedings paper