Program comprehension during software maintenance and evolution

Abstract

Computer COMMON ELEMENTS OF COGNITION MODELS The program comprehension process uses existing knowledge to acquire new knowledge that ultimately meets the goals of a code cognition task. This process references both existing and newly acquired knowledge to build a mental model of the software that is under consideration. Understanding depends on strategies. While these cognition strategies vary, they all formulate hypotheses and then resolve, revise, or abandon them. Knowledge Programmers possess two types of knowledge: general knowledge that is independent of the specific software application they are trying to under

The effect of task order on the maintainability of object-oriented software

“…A process of program comprehension will always try to use existing knowledge to acquire new knowledge. Existing knowledge can be classified into two types: general and software-specific [25]. The former is typically knowledge about programming languages, algorithms and such like, while the latter pertains to understanding a specific application.…”

“…Several empirical studies have investigated program comprehension and software maintenance (see [25]). These studies were conducted to collect information to support the program comprehension models or to validate them, and range from observational (behavioural) studies to controlled experiments.…”

Identifying high-level dependence structures using slice-based dependence analysis

“…Due to the importance and high cost of program comprehension, a large amount of research has been carried out, in an attempt to guide and support software engineers in this process [28,91,112,114,120]. Within these efforts, substantial interest is usually directed towards the specific topic of automated assistance to software comprehension.…”

“…Integrated model -combination of both top-down and bottom-up model. When code is familiar, the integrated strategy uses the top-down model, and when the code is unknown, the bottom-up strategy is used [120].…”

Exploring software systems

“…according to this theory, programmers frequently change between top-down and bottom-up approaches (Letovsky I Let86 ]), or even combine them at the same time ( von Mayrhauser and Vans [MV95,MV96,MV97]), to create mental representations of a software system.…”