Source animation as a means of program comprehension for object-oriented systems

Abstract

Object oriented systems are particularly difficult to comprehend because of the distribution of functionality and polymorphism which limits the effectiveness of conventional static analysis methods. The paper proposes a dynamic analysis approach using animation to simulate the use cases in a financial application system. The objective is to offer maintenance programmers a means of familiarizing themselves with complex C++ code while at the same time validating the correctness of the code. For this purpose, control flow slicing and concept lattices are used.