Visualizing and querying software structures

Software engineering problems often involve large sets of objects and complex relationships among them. This report proposes that graphical visualization techniques can help engineers understand and solve a class of these problems. To illustrate this, two problems are analyzed and recast using the graphical language GraphLog. The first problem is that of simplifying dependencies among components of a system, which translates into removing cycles from a graph. The second problem is that of designing an efficient code overlay structure, which is facilitated in several ways through graphical techniques.