Thanks to Jamie, who pointed me to this nice project. The Mini Walker is a prototype that allows the user to browse C# classes visually. It uses the Mini Diagram, a convention designed specifically for the visual representation of C# types and their relations. The Mini Diagram convention goes in opposite direction than UML, adding descriptive graphic details wherever possible.

Specifically here we need to see all the fields, methods, properties and events, not just the public members of the type. And most importantly, we need to map the dependencies in these members so that we can literally see the level and intensity of the dependency. Why? Because it lets us see how the types are working without reading every single line of the source. It also gives us a helicopter-view of type quality – types with many references are either extremely high-level or perhaps just in need of a refactor. And finally, Minis give us an at-a-glance feel of type purpose.

Tags: information visualization, modeling tool, reverse engineering, software visualization