| Summary: | When performing development tasks, such as modifications and debugging,
developers must often understand and manipulate source code that crosscuts
a software system's structure. These tasks are made more difficult by limitations
of the two approaches currently used to present crosscutting structure:
tree views and structure diagrams. Tree views force the developer to manually
synthesize information from multiple views; structure diagrams quickly
suffer from graphical complexity. We introduce an active model as a means
of presenting the right information about the crosscutting structure to a developer
at the right time. An active model is produced as a result of three
operations—projection, expansion, and abstraction. Combined with particular
user interaction features during display,' these operations enable a view
of the model to be presented to the developer without suffering from the
complexity of existing approaches. We have implemented an active model
tool, called ActiveAspect, for presenting crosscutting structure described by
AspectJ aspects. We report on the results of a case study in which the tool
was used effectively by two subjects to implement a modification task to a
non-trivial AspectJ system. === Science, Faculty of === Computer Science, Department of === Graduate
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