  Understanding or comprehending source code is one of the core activities of
software engineering. Understanding object-oriented source code is essential
and required when a programmer maintains, migrates, reuses, documents or
enhances source code. The source code that is not comprehended cannot be
changed. The comprehension of object-oriented source code is a difficult
problem solving process. In order to document object-oriented software system
there are needs to understand its source code. To do so, it is necessary to
mine source code dependencies in addition to quantitative information in source
code such as the number of classes. This paper proposes an automatic approach,
which aims to document object-oriented software by visualizing its source code.
The design of the object-oriented source code and its main characteristics are
represented in the visualization. Package content, class information,
relationships between classes, dependencies between methods and software
metrics is displayed. The extracted views are very helpful to understand and
document the object-oriented software. The novelty of this approach is the
exploiting of code dependencies and quantitative information in source code to
document object-oriented software efficiently by means of a set of graphs. To
validate the approach, it has been applied to several case studies. The results
of this evaluation showed that most of the object-oriented software systems
have been documented correctly.
