Separating architectural concerns to ease program understanding

Abstract

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. The approach leverages two orthogonal architectural views of a system and describes how a proper identification of boundaries for separate concerns helps in reasoning about the system.