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We describe the Query-Model-Refine (QMR) approach for retrieving and modeling information for program comprehension. The QMR approach allows the flexibility to design and execute application-specific problem-solving strategies to suit particular program ...

Reusing syntax specifications without embedded arbitrary semantic actions is straightforward because the semantic analysis phases of new applications can feed off trees or other intermediate structures constructed by the pre-existing parser. The ...

Partial comprehension is a necessity in the evolution and maintenance of very large software systems. The programmers form not only partial comprehension of the code, but also partial comprehension of the application domain. To describe the ...

While the sources of complexity in the initial design and verification of multi-threaded software systems are well-documented, less is known of the issues specific to the maintenance of these systems. The literature contains a number of observational ...

As an object-oriented system evolves, its architecture tends to drift away from the original design. Knowledge of how the system has changed at coarse-grained levels is key to understanding the de facto architecture, as it helps to identify potential ...

TinyOS has proven to be an effective platform for developing reactive embedded network applications. However, the platform's lean programming model and power-efficient operation come at a price: TinyOS applications are notoriously difficult to construct ...

The concern location problem is to identify the source code within a program related to the features, requirements, or other concerns of the program. This problem is central to program development and maintenance. We present a new technique called prune ...

Developers rely on the mechanisms provided by their IDE to browse and navigate a large software system. These mechanisms are usually based purely on a system's static source code. The static perspective, however, is not enough to understand an object-...

Using automatic program analysis techniques for extracting architectural information and its visualization is widely considered useful for program understanding. However, it has to be empirically validated if a given technique is beneficial in practice. ...

Since early variable mnemonics were limited to as few as six to eight characters, many early programmers abbreviated concepts in their variable names. The past thirty years has seen a steady increase in permitted name length and, slowly, an increase in ...

We present the results of two controlled experiments to compare ER and UML class diagrams, in order to find out which of the models provides better support during the comprehension of data models. The experiment involved Master and Bachelor students ...

Traceability in software involves discovering links between different artifacts, and is useful for a myriad of tasks in the software life cycle. We compare several different Information Retrieval techniques for this task, across two data sets involving ...

Information about the problem domain of the software and the solution it implements is often embedded by developers in comments and identifiers. When using software developed by others or when are new to a project, programmers know little about how ...

Modern software systems are typically large and complex, making comprehension of these systems extremely difficult. Experienced programmers comprehend code by seamlessly processing synonyms and other word relations. Thus, we believe that automated ...

Maintainers face the daunting task of wading through a collection of both new and old revisions, trying to ferret out revisions which warrant personal inspection. One can rank revisions by size/lines of code (LOC), but often, due to the distribution of ...

Inheritance is an important mechanism when developing object-oriented programs with class-based programming languages: it enables subtyping, polymorphism, and code reuse. Inheritance is also known as a difficult feature to grasp and to use correctly ...

Over the last decade many techniques for software clone detection have been proposed. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the capabilities of currently available clone detection techniques. We begin with an overall survey based on ...

Slicing C programs has been one of the most popular ways for the implementation of slicing algorithms; out of the very few practical implementations that exist many deal with this programming language. Yet, preprocessor related issues have been ...

This paper examines the effectiveness of a new language-specific parser-based but lightweight clone detection approach. Exploiting a novel application of a source transformation system, the method accurately finds near-miss clones using an efficient ...

The research examines the version histories of nine open source software systems to uncover trends and characteristics of how developers commit source code to version control systems (e.g., subversion). The goal is to characterize what a typical or ...

The way in which a system's software archive is partitioned influences the evolvability of that system. The partition of a software archive, e.g. subsystem decomposition, is mostly assessed by looking at the static (include, call) relations between the ...

Software maintenance tasks typically involve an important amount of program investigation effort on the part of software developers. To what extent can we benefit from prior program investigation activities to decrease this effort? To investigate this ...

Task switching occurs frequently during the work of software developers. While there are already several approaches aiming at assisting developers in recovering their contexts of previous tasks, they generally rely on the developer to identify the ...

REportal is an existing web-based reverse engineering portal web site that provides access to a suite of reverse engineering and program comprehension tools via a web browser. This abstraction was intended to allow ease of system maintenance by adding ...