Question

I recall a while back seeing an experimental code visualization tool, with the intention being to enable a user to manually track interconnectivity between different parts of their code for the purposes of implementing specific features. In particular, a user could pull out a window into their code and associate it with a completely different part of their code, seeing lots of independently controllable code snippets (and any relevant notes) linked together. The purpose of this tool was to enable someone working on a chunk of code that crossed multiple functions (or separate modules) to be able to more cleanly figure out what was going on and to see more of the relevant code at once. This is kind of similar to just opening boatloads of small windows at once, drawing lines between them, and having each window be a view of a file (some windows could be looking at different parts of the same file, some windows might just be notes).

I think the experimenters made an Eclipse plugin for the concept using Java.

Anyone have any idea what I’m talking about?

Answer 1

Maybe CodeBubble?

The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth.
Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

(although Mylyn is kind of similar in its approach, but with less diagrams 😉 )