This research seeks ways to aid program understanding, development, testing, and debugging by using visualization and animation. We hope to use visualizations to expose the "insides" of computer programs, making evident attributes of a program that are difficult to assess otherwise. We have developed a system called Lens that allows programmers to create algorithm animation style presentations for the programs they are debugging. Most importantly, no text coding is required to create the views.

Pictured here is a snapshot of the Lens tool being used to examine a depth first search program. On top is the generated animation of the program. In the lower window, to the left is the program source, in the top right is the graphical editor for specifying the appearance of the program, and in the lower right is the debugger command shell.

The Lens system is available via anonymous ftp. You will need dbx, the X Window System, and Motif to run it. It has only been tested on SPARCstations running Sun OS 4.1.3. To go to the directory to retrieve it, press here.

Mukherjea, Sougata and Stasko, John T., "Toward Visual Debugging: Integrating Algorithm Animation Capabilities within a Source Level Debugger", ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 1, No. 3, September 1994, pp. 215-244.

Mukherjea, Sougata and Stasko, John T. , "Applying Algorithm Animation Techniques for Program Tracing, Debugging, and Understanding", Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Software Engineering, Baltimore, MD, May 1993, pp. 456-465.