Source Animation as a Means of Program Comprehension
Harry Marsh Sneed · Workshop on Program Comprehension · 2000
Object-oriented systems are particularly difficult to comprehend because of the distribution of functionality, encapsulation of data, inheritance and polymorphism. Polymorphism, in particular, limits the effectiveness of conventional static analysis methods. This paper proposes a dynamic analysis approach using animation to simulate use cases in a large financial application. The objective is to offer maintenance programmers a means of familiarizing themselves with complex C++ code while at the same time validating the correctness of the code. For this purpose, control flow slicing and concept lattices are used.