An approach to Mapping Between Dynamic Data and Visualization in DIVA

[[abstract]]When software grows larger and more complicated, debugging tools have maed little progress. When debugging computer programs with complicated data structure, users may still rely on inserting extra code (for example, printf) to aid debugging. Although there are many visualization tools that help programmers to debug by graphs, pictures, and animation, they are still limited and not prevalent for practical uses. For example, these tools may limit their visualization for data structure of a particular class or users may have to write extra visualization code. These drawbacks limit the practical usage of visualization tool in programmers’ everyday life. In this thesis, a visualization tool called DIVA(Debugging Information Visualization Assistant) is proposed to help programmers debugging their software. DIVA use 3D graphs, pictures, and animation to visualize user data structure. The goal of DIVA is to provide an environment which allow users to compose ideal visualization metaphors for their interested data structures in a convenient and friendly manner. We design a Mapping Engine to help user mapping their data into appropriate VM. This mapping engine enables a new flexible, composable, and extensible mapping approach that address the difficult mapping problem in software visualization.