Understanding the engineering behind modern software can be a great challenge. Programs today consist of millions of lines of code, spread over thousands of files. Even with access to source code, there are many barriers to meaningful comprehension of even small parts of the software. Our Sequence Explorer tools and techniques to help alleviate those problems.

Built on top of the SWT framework from JFace and Zest, the Sequence Explorer offers clean, robust, and efficient ways to visualize the flow of software using familiar UML Sequence Diagram Notation.

This isn't the first project to visualize software as a sequence diagram. But, it does offer something different. It is a viewer that presents sequence diagrams in a data-independent way. So, it is possible to use the viewer to present sequence diagrams from Java, C/C++, Perl, or even from instrumented program traces without the need for an entirely new software suite. It is a step toward bringing software comprehension tools into the IDEs and software suites that engineers and reverse engineers already use.