Comprehensive software understanding with SEXTANT

Current tools for software understanding mostly concentrate on one comprehension technique, e.g., visualization, or bottom-up navigation through software elements via hyperlinks. In this paper we argue that to effectively assist developers in understanding today's software systems, a combination of several comprehension techniques is needed including seamless integration of top-down querying and bottom-up navigation strategies that work across different kinds of software artifacts; furthermore, application domain and/or technology specific relationships between software elements should be taken into consideration; last but not least, a tight integration of such tools into development environments is crucial. We present SEXTANT, a software exploration tool tightly integrated into the Eclipse IDE that satisfies these requirements. In two case studies, we demonstrate how SEXTANT's features are conducive in tracking down the source of erroneous behavior, respectively, in discovering 'bad smells' in the software structure which should lead to code refactorings.