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seven packages. Some trees have no leaves, thus indicating that no
attributes are present. Some trees have branches that point up. When trees
do not have leaves and the branches point up it is possible that we are
presenting the case of a façade pattern. The leaves of some trees are
brown, while others are green. In the first case, we can deduce that these
classes are not properly commented, while the source code is commented
in the latter case. The forest also contains a few trees whose branches are
parallel to the ground. These trees have brown leaves, thus suggesting that
the classes have a large number of private methods and are scarcely
commented. Therefore, we can deduce that the greater part of the
functionality implemented by these classes is only accessible through a
few public methods.
Fig. 7.4. A Sample Forest composed of 7 packages.
Implementation
The proposed approach has been implemented in a prototype of a
supporting software system that allows the maintainer to navigate freely
and interact with the forests to improve his/her comprehension of a subject
system. In particular, the entire forest is visualized in real-time and the
maintainer can navigate around the forest using a free-fly 3D camera. The
maintainer can travel inside the forest without movement limits and it is
possible to pass through trees. The maintainer can then enlarge a tree of
interest. In addition, the maintainers can also skip from a release of that
system to the subsequent or previous ones.
The prototype is composed of three main components. The first
extracts all the metrics needed for the visualization and produces an XML
file. This design allows the independent extraction of the metrics from the
rendering engine. It is implemented in Java. The second component maps
the tree parameters and the extracted metrics. This component is
implemented in Java and produces an XML file that is then passed to the
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