Publikationen

Autor	Reynolds-Ringer, Steven Lamarr; Mertz, Tobias; Kohlhammer, Jörn
Datum	2026
Art	Paper
Abstrakt	Program comprehension and code navigation consume most of a software developer’s time, but dedicated visualization tools are often not adopted in practice. We present a Visual Studio Code extension called CodeSkyline, a codemap visualization with three additional views in a juxtaposed stack-pattern, including the folder hierarchy, the file couplings, and the centrality of files. This supports the user in program comprehension, navigation, code discovery, fault localization, and evolution tasks across multiple abstraction levels. The levelof- detail visualization scales to large software repositories. We evaluated it in a qualitative think-aloud study (n=6) and a fourweek adoption study. The tool scored very high on the System Usability Scale, and half of the participants reported occasional use after the study. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/rh5q6.
Konferenz	Working Conference on Software Visualization 2026
Url	https://publica.fraunhofer.de/handle/publica/522034

CodeSkyline: A Code-Map Visualization with Juxtaposed Views for Program Comprehension and Navigation