Towards an integrated toolset for program understanding
John Mylopoulos, Martin Stanley, Kenny Wong, Morris Bernstein, Renato De Mori, Graham Ewart, Kostas Kontogiannis, Ettore Merlo, Hausi A. Müller, Scott Tilley, Marijana Tomić · 1994
This paper describes some early results of a three-year project to develop an integrated toolset for program understanding. The implemented integration architecture involves both a global repository for all tools serviced by the architecture and a software bus serving communications among tools. 1 Introduction Program understanding is the process of developing mental models of a software system's intended architecture, purpose, and behaviour. Software engineers spend more time understanding existing code than they do designing, programming, testing, or debugging. Moreover, the need for program understanding is growing in parallel with the amount of legacy code currently in use. Not surprisingly, there have been numerous research efforts to develop tools that provide assistance during the understanding process. These tools adopt a number of different approaches, including visualization, pattern-matching, and knowledge-based techniques. Despite successful results from each of these app...