Abstract-An identifier is an important key in mapping program elements onto domain knowledge for the purpose of program comprehension. Therefore, if identifiers in a program have inappropriate names, developers can waste a lot of time trying to understand the program. This paper proposes a method for extracting and gathering verb-object (V-O) relations, as good examples of naming, from source code written in an object-oriented programming language. For each of several application domains, dictionaries containing the V-O relations are built and evaluated by software developers. The evaluation results confirm that the relations in the dictionaries are adequate in many cases.
The state of a program at runtime is useful information for developers to understand a program. Omniscient debugging and logging-based tools enable developers to investigate the state of a program at an arbitrary point of time in an execution. While these tools are effective to analyze the state at a single point of time, they might be insufficient to understand the generic behavior of a method which includes various control-flow paths. In this paper, we propose REMViewer (Repeatedly-Executed-Method Viewer), or a tool that visualizes multiple execution paths of a Java method. The tool shows each execution path in a separated view so that developers can firstly select actual execution paths of interest and then compare the state of local variables in the paths.
SUMMARYTo understand the behavior of a program, developers often need to read source code fragments in various modules. Systemdependence-graph-based (SDG) program slicing is a good candidate for supporting the investigation of data-flow paths among modules, as SDG is capable of showing the data-dependence of focused program elements. However, this technique has two problems. First, constructing SDG requires heavyweight analysis, so SDG is not suitable for daily uses. Second, the results of SDG-based program slicing are difficult to visualize, as they contain many vertices. In this research, we proposed variable dataflow graphs (VDFG) for use in program slicing techniques. In contrast to SDG, VDFG is created by lightweight analysis because several approximations are used. Furthermore, we propose using the fractal value to visualize VDFG-based program slice in order to reduce the graph complexity for visualization purposes. We performed three experiments that demonstrate the accuracy of VDFG program slicing with fractal value, the size of a visualized program slice, and effectiveness of our tool for source code reading.
SUMMARYProgram slicing is an important approach for debugging, program comprehension, impact analysis, etc. There are various program slicing techniques ranging from the lightweight to the more accurate but heavyweight. Comparative analyses are important for selecting the most appropriate technique. This paper presents a comparative study of four backward program slicing techniques for Java. The results show the scalability and precision of these techniques. We develop guidelines that indicate which slicing techniques are appropriate for different situations, based on the results.
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