Hello,

my name is Christopher Kurtz and I am a diploma thesis student at the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University.

In my diploma thesis code name "Code Gestalt" I want to find out if and how a programmer's daily work can be simplified by providing new and intuitive ways to visualize source code. To that end I'd like to learn about your practical experience with visualization tools.

The findings of this survey will be used exclusively for scientific and research purposes in the context of a diploma thesis. Of course all information you provide will be used 100% anonymously.

The survey is available in English and German.

Of course you are also invited leave any additional comments in the topic below. Also feel free to spread the word in your blogs and feeds :-)

Thanks for your help!

Chris

done.

Thx!

your survey assumes i have a large monitor; i do not. So I can not finish it.

I will give you this warning, at my job I use several different diagrams and find them useful on a cusary level. However, I get very annoyed when system engineers think they can write programs using these diagrams. There is usally a ton of information these diagrams don't capture; or by time they capture them they are so complicated; it is easier for me to just read the code.

I can not count the number of times I have created a diagram and then when I dug into the code; I only followed the spirit of the diagram but not its letter and instead did a slightly different implementation that was superior to the original diagram.

I'm sorry, that the survey layout imposes difficulties on you. May I ask, what resolution and browser you have? Most browsers should allow you to shrink the layouted site (in Firefox this is 'Ctrl' + 'Minus'). That certainly is not the silver bullet in terms of accessebility (my bad), but it should make the survey fit a 800 x 600 screen.

I think, what you talk about is very true when you are trying to engineer a software using visualization tools to model it before writing code. That surely is an important field of application. My focus lies more on the side of reengineering, teaching and understanding of existing software systems.

But the ting you say about diagramms being to complicated and not able to capture what a human would abstract from the source code (especially true with UML-Class-Diagramms) is one of my main motivations in this diploma thesis. I want my software to do better ;-)

Regards,
Chris

You should note that your survey doesn't work under internet explorer It wasn't until you mentioned the key strokes in firefox I realized you didn't test for the browser I use.

Good luck on your project.

Salindor

I wanted to thank you all for your participation in the survey. The response was quite spectacular and I think this has become the largest scientific survey on that topic so far.

If you want to take the survey, hurry up, as I will close it tomorrow.

Thanks again, this project would not be possible without your help :-)

Regards,
Chris