Assessment of support for program understanding

Abstract

Discusses tools for program understanding during the software maintenance phase. The program understanding is crucial to successful maintenance, but it is still poorly supported by analysis-oriented tools. In the light of cognitive studies for program understanding, the authors assess the existing tools for program understanding, and suggest an approach which facilitates the understanding of complex code during maintenance via the chunking process. During this process programmers recognize the abstract function or meaning of groups of statements and then piece together these chunks to form even larger chunks until the entire code is understood and mapped out. Chunking support can be effective as part of a maintenance toolkit. It lets maintenance personnel control code abstraction and ask many semantic questions about chunks and their relationship to other parts of the code.<>