A cooperative program understanding environment

Abstract

The large size and high-percentage of domain-specific code in most legacy systems makes it unlikely that automated understanding tools will be able to completely understand them. Yet automated tools can clearly recognize portions of the design. That suggests exploring environments in which programmer and system work together to understand legacy software. This paper describes such an environment that supports programmer and system cooperating to extract an object-oriented design from legacy software systems. It combines an automated program understanding component that recognizes standard implementations of domain independent plans with with a structured notebook that the programmer uses to link object-oriented design primitives to arbitrary source code fragments. This jointly extracted information is used to support conceptual queries about the program's code and design.<>