Do dynamic object process graphs support program understanding? - a controlled experiment

Using automatic program analysis techniques for ex-tracting architectural information and its visualization is widely considered useful for program understanding. However, it has to be empirically validated if a given technique is beneficial in practice. This is usually done by performing a set of case studies. To find out for sure whether a technique really has any effect, controlled ex-periments have to be conducted. Dynamic object process graphs are one such tech-nique. These graphs describe the control flow of an application from the perspective of a single object. In previous research, we conducted case studies which in-dicated that they may be useful for program understand-ing, but this assumption has not been validated so far. We report on a controlled experiment which investi-gated this question: Does the availability of such graphs support program understanding or not? We describe the research questions that were investigated, the hy-potheses, experimental setup, conduction, and discuss the results and lessons learned.