Dynamic software visualization should provide a programmer with insights as to what the program is doing. Most current dynamic visualizations either use program traces to show information about prior runs, slow the program down substantially, show only minimal information, or force the programmer to indicate when to turn visualizations on or off. We have developed a dynamic Java visualizer that provides a view of a program in action with low enough overhead that it can be used almost all the time by programmers to understand what their program is doing while it is doing it.
Steven P. Reiss