DR-Tools: a suite of lightweight open-source tools to measure and visualize Java source code

TL;DR

DR-Tools is an open-source suite of lightweight tools designed to analyze, measure, and visualize Java source code to assist developers in software maintenance and evolution activities.

Contribution

Introduction of a comprehensive open-source toolset with heuristics for code analysis and visualization to support software developers in maintenance tasks.

Findings

Positive feedback from case studies on tool usability.

Tools effectively visualize code metrics.

Insights for future tool development.

Abstract

In Software Engineering, some of the most critical activities are maintenance and evolution. However, to perform both with quality, minimizing impacts and risks, developers need to analyze and identify where the main problems come from previously. In this paper, we introduce DR-Tools Suite, a set of lightweight open-source tools that analyze and calculate source code metrics, allowing developers to visualize the results in different formats and graphs. Also, we define a set of heuristics to help the code analysis. We conducted two case studies (one academic and one industrial) to collect feedback on the tools suite, on how we will evolve the tools, as well as insights to develop new tools that support developers in their daily work.