Improving System Understanding via Interactive, Tailorable, Source Code Analysis.

Jakobac, Vladimir; Egyed, Alexander; Medvidovic, Nenad

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-31984-9_19

Improving System Understanding via Interactive, Tailorable, Source Code Analysis.

by Vladimir Jakobac, Alexander Egyed, Nenad Medvidovic

Abstract:

In situations in which developers are not familiar with a system or its documentation is inadequate, the systemâ€™s source code becomes the only reliable source of information. Unfortunately, source code has much more detail than is needed to understand the system, and it disperses or obscures high-level constructs that would ease the systemâ€™s understanding. Automated tools can aid system understanding by identifying recurring program features, classifying the system modules based on their purpose and usage patterns, and analyzing dependencies across the modules. This paper presents an iterative, user-guided approach to program understanding based on a framework for analyzing and visualizing software systems. The framework is built around a pluggable and extensible set of clues about a given problem domain, execution environment, and/or programming language. We evaluate our approach by providing the analysis of our toolâ€™s results obtained from several case studies.

Reference:

Vladimir Jakobac, Alexander Egyed, Nenad Medvidovic, "Improving System Understanding via Interactive, Tailorable, Source Code Analysis.", pp. 253-268, 2005.

Bibtex Entry:

@Conference{DBLP:conf/fase/JakobacEM05,
  Title                    = {Improving System Understanding via Interactive, Tailorable, Source Code Analysis.},
  Author                   = {Vladimir Jakobac and Alexander Egyed and Nenad Medvidovic},
  Booktitle                = {8th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE), Edinburgh, Scotland},
  Year                     = {2005},
  Pages                    = {253-268},

  Abstract                 = {In situations in which developers are not familiar with a system or its documentation is inadequate, the systemâ€™s source code becomes the only reliable source of information. Unfortunately, source code has much more detail than is needed to understand the system, and it disperses or obscures high-level constructs that would ease the systemâ€™s understanding. Automated tools can aid system understanding by identifying recurring program features, classifying the system modules based on their purpose and usage patterns, and analyzing dependencies across the modules. This paper presents an iterative, user-guided approach to program understanding based on a framework for analyzing and visualizing software systems. The framework is built around a pluggable and extensible set of clues about a given problem domain, execution environment, and/or programming language. We evaluate our approach by providing the analysis of our toolâ€™s results obtained from several case studies.},
  Doi                      = {10.1007/978-3-540-31984-9_19},
  File                     = {Improving System Understanding via  Interactive, Tailorable Source Code Analysis:Conferences\\FASE 2005 - Improving System Understanding via Interactive, Tailorable Source Code Analysis\\Improving System Understanding via  Interactive, Tailorable Source Code Analysis .pdf:PDF},
  Keywords                 = {reverseengineering}
}