Three Challenges in Program Redocumentation for Distributed Systems

There are a number of pressing research challenges in redocumenting distributed systems that could be the focus of attention in the next few years. This paper presents an overview of three of these challenges, categorized according to their scale and scope: in-the-small, in-the-large, and in-the-many (borrowing a classification mechanism from programming language research from a number of years ago). These challenges have been identified based on experience gained from over 15 years of research into program redocumentation via reverse engineering. The impact of these challenges on software development for distributed systems is also discussed.