Code comprehension as a distributed construction of meanings

Code comprehension, a sub-domain of reverse engineering and software maintenance, does not provide useful explanation of common situations where developers, distributed and isolated from each other in time and space, come to a similar understanding of a code. This limits our ability to develop tools to support this popular aspect of code comprehension. This paper investigates this phenomenon from the perspective of sociology, intentionally distancing itself from the dominating psychological approach. The analysis, conducted mostly from the standpoint of social systems theory, highlights that as the construction of meanings is subjective, in the absence of any significant interactions, the dominant influence on the construction of meanings comes from current states of various social systems to which the developer belongs to. Thus, the similarity of meanings (hence a better comprehension of the code) can be achieved by understanding systems to which the developer belongs to and by coordinating their states. Keywords: computer science, code comprehension, social systems theory, reverse engineering, software maintenance