Finding the Right Needles in Hay - Helping Program Comprehension of Large Software Systems
Ioana Şora · 2015
Maintenance of complex software systems can be done by software engineers only after they understand well the existing code. Program comprehension is supported by documentation - either developer documentation or reverse engineered. What is most often missing is a short document providing the new user with useful information to start with - an executive summary. In this work we propose a tool to automatically extract such a summary, by identifying the most important classes of a system. Our approach relies on techniques of static analysis of dependencies and graph-based ranking. Experiments on a set of real systems show good results.