A Visualization Tool for Relationship between Source Code and Parse Tree Using VR

Software development process is composed of several activities such as planning, specification development, module design, algorithm design, coding, and test. Various documents are created through these processes, which are related each other as software configuration. Beginners such as student cannot understand mutual relationship within the software configuration well. Considering this situation, we propose and develop a visualization tool named VRale-SCM which shows these documents in 3D virtual reality space. The tool visualizes mutual relationship among the documents so that students can navigate the documents through the relationship. Students are thus expected to clearly understand the relationships by this tool. In this paper, we focus on the coding process. VRale-SCM visualizes relationship between Java source code and the parse tree. Name table is utilized to visualize correspondence among definition and reference of the same name within the source code and the corresponding parse tree.