Program Comprehension

In this paper a new maintenance scenario is outlined based on refactoring techniques. Specifically, refactoring techniques are classified according to two opposed program properties: understanding and efficiency. Understanding oriented refactoring disassembles the program preparing it for maintenance, whereas those oriented to efficiency rearrange it for running. Also, we show the challenges raised from this new perspective on maintenance. At present, this ongoing research is being carried out in the functional

The area of program comprehension comprises a vast body of literature, with numerous conflicting models having been proposed. Models are typically grounded in experimental studies mostly involving experienced programmers. The question of how to relate this material to the teaching and learning of programming for novices has proven challenging for many researchers. In this critical review from a computer science

One of the main challenges faced by today's developers is keeping up with the staggering amount of source code that needs to be read and understood. In order to help developers with this problem and reduce the costs associated with it, one solution is to use simple textual descriptions of source code entities that developers can grasp easily, while capturing the code semantics precisely. We propose an approach to automatically determine such descriptions, based on automated text summarization technology.

In my PhD thesis I argued that we need to make our software analysis tools work beyond individual software systems at the level of software ecosystems.

I gave two reasons for this: (1) by analyzing a system in context we can better understand it and (2) analyzing software ecosystems in themselves can provide insight that otherwise would not be possible.

This paper presents a cognitive framework for describing behaviors involved in program composition, comprehension, debugging, modification, and the acquisition of new programming concepts, skills, and knowledge. An information processing model is presented which includes a long-term store of semantic and syntactic knowledge, and a working memory in which problem solutions are constructed. New experimental evidence is presented to support the model of syntactic/semantic interaction.

THE ADHERENCE OF OPEN SOURCE JAVA PROGRAMMERS TO STANDARD CODING PRACTICES Mahmoud O. Elish Department of Computer Science George Mason University Fairfax VA 22030-4400 USA melish@gmu.edu Jeff Offutt† Information and Software Engineering George Mason University Fairfax VA 22030-4400 USA www.ise.gmu.edu/~ofut/ ofut@ise.gmu.edu ABSTRACT The use of agreed-upon coding practices is believed to enhance program comprehension, which directly affects reuse and maintainability. ...

Recent research in the field of object-oriented software engineering has been focusing on the usage of software metrics for the assessment of a product's quality. Software design coupling metrics include some of the most widely applicable metrics used in the modern software industry. Although static coupling metrics are used for analyzing the structural aspects of the object-oriented software systems, their inability to capture the behavioral aspects is well known and hence has given way to the evolution of their runtime counterparts i.e. the dynamic coupling metrics. Most of the dynamic coupling metrics proposed until now have not yet been empirically validated due to the high evaluation cost involved in the runtime metric data collection, hence limiting their practical application. This paper, as a part of our ongoing research on empirical validation of the dynamic coupling metrics, presents an empirical investigation into the static and dynamic CBO (Coupling Between Objects) metrics using some open source real world java applications. A set of criteria for the selection of sample benchmark applications required for the dynamic metrics validation has also been devised. A scenario based approach in combination with the appropriate statistical techniques has been used in an attempt to correlate the static and dynamic coupling metrics.

Given the importance of identifier names and the value of naming conventions to program comprehension, we speculated in previous work whether a connection exists between the quality of identifier names and software quality. We found that flawed identifiers in Java classes were associated with source code found to be of low quality by static analysis. This paper extends that work in three directions. First, we show that the association also holds at the finer granularity level of Java methods. This in turn makes it possible to, ...

In the software engineering literature, many works claim that the use of design patterns improves the comprehensibility of programs and, more generally, their maintainability. Yet, little work attempted to study the impact of design patterns on the developers' tasks of program comprehension and modification. We design and perform an experiment to collect data on the impact of the Visitor pattern on comprehension and modification tasks with class diagrams. We use an eye-tracker to register saccades and ...

By the early 1990s the need for reengineering legacy systems was already acute, but recently the demand has increased sig- nificantly with the shift toward web-based user interfaces. The demand by all business sectors to adapt their informa- tion systems to the Web has created a tremendous need for methods, tools, and infrastructures to evolve and exploit ex- isting applications

The scope of software visualization tools which exist for the navigation, analysis and presentation of software information varies widely. One class of tools, which we refer to as Software exploration tools, provides graphical representations of static software structures linked to textual views of the program source code and documentation. This paper describes a hierarchy of cognitive issues which should be considered during the design of a software exploration tool. The hierarchy of cognitive design elements is derived through the ...

Early experiments have suggested that program auralization can convey information about program structure [8]. Languages like Pascal contain classes of construct that are similar in nature allowing hierarchical classification of their features. This taxonomy can be reflected in the design of musical signatures which are used within the CAITLIN program auralization system. Experiments using these hierarchical leitmotifs indicate whether or not their similarities can be put to good use in communicating information about program structure and state.

The authors have explored ways to enhance users' comprehension of complex applications using music and special sound effects to present application program events that are difficult to visually detect. A prototype system, InfoSound, allows developers to create and store musical sequences and special sound effects, to associate stored musical sequences and sound effects to application events, and to have real-time, continuous auditory control of sounds during application execution. InfoSound has been used to create auditory interfaces for two applications: a telephone network service simulation and a parallel computation simulation. The auditory interfaces in these applications helped users detect rapid, multiple event sequences that were difficult to visually detect using text and graphical interfaces. The paper describes the architecture of InfoSound, use of the system, and lessons the authors have learnt

Automatic program comprehension applications, which try to extract programming knowledge from program code, share many fea- tures of human program comprehension models. However, the human trait of learning seems to be missing among the shared features. We present an approach to integrate machine learning techniques into auto- matic program comprehension, and present an example implementation in the context of automatic analysis of roles of variables.