Visualizing the behavior of object-oriented systems

Numerous classes, complex inheritance and containment hierarchies, and diverse patterns of dynamic interaction all contribute to difficulties in understanding, reusing, debugging, and tuning large object-oriented systems. To help overcome these difficulties, we introduce novel views of the behavior of object-oriented systems and an architecture for creating and animating these views. We describe platform-independent techniques for instrumenting object-oriented programs, a language-independent protocol for monitoring their execution, and a structure for decoupling the execution of a subject program from its visualization. Case studies involving tuning and debugging of real systems are presented to demonstrate the benefits of visualization. We believe that visualization will prove to be a valuable tool for object-oriented software development.