A hybrid approach to recognizing programming plans

Most current models of program understanding are unlikely to scale up successfully. Top-down approaches require advance knowledge of what the program is supposed to do, which is rarely available with aging software systems. Bottom-up approaches require complete matching of the program against a library of programming plans, which is impractical with the large plan libraries needed to understand programs that contain many domain-specific plans. This paper presents a hybrid approach to program understanding that uses an indexed, hierarchical organization of the plan library to limit the number of candidate plans considered during program understanding. This approach is based on observations made from studying student programmers attempt to perform bottom-up understanding on geometrically-oriented C functions.<>