DECODE: A Co-operative Program Understanding Environment
David N. Chin, Alex Quilici · Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice · 1996
The large size and high-percentage of domain-specific code in most legacy systems makes it unlikely that automated tools will be able to extract a complete underlying design. Yet automated tools can clearly recognize portions of the design. This suggests exploring environments in which programmer and system work together to understand legacy software. DECODE is such an environment. It supports programmer and system co-operation to extract design information from legacy software systems. DECODE's automated program understanding component recognizes standard implementations of domain independent plans to produce an initial knowledge base of object-orientated design elements. DECODE's structured notebook component provides the user with a graphical view of the initial understanding, which the user can extend by linking arbitrary source code fragments to either existing or new design elements, and then uses this design information to support conceptual queries about the program's code and design.