Ontology-Based Software Graphs for Supporting Code Comprehension During Onboarding

Software engineers in modern development settings often face the challenge of contributing to large existing projects. The comprehension of foreign software code presents a time consuming obstacle, especially in contexts like onboarding. New employees have little knowledge of the software project they are supposed to contribute to. Therefore, tools supporting developers with their code comprehension are desirable to help them contribute to the best of their ability as soon as possible. Such tools must be flexible enough to work with any software project, while offering means for adjustments to very specific tasks.In this paper, we present an approach to visualize source code as node-link diagrams, using expert-designed ontologies to group various source code elements such as classes or methods. We evaluate our approach with nine advanced computer science students simulating an onboarding in a software project consisting of almost 100k lines of code. The results show that our approach supports code comprehension by utilizing expert knowledge of the visualized project, while also pointing to other use cases such as legacy code migration.