V. R. Basili and H. D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., SE-8(3):270--283, 1982.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....programmers ability to comprehend programs [7] This observation has prompted several researchers to investigate the processes involved in understanding programs. Of interest to this paper are works from two disparate communities: academic researchers in computer science and psychology, such as [1, 3, 18, 19], and practitioners and managers in the industry, such as [22, 23, 25] The papers [3, 18] propose theoretical models of cognitive processes involved in program understanding. These models have been subjected to experimental analysis by other researchers [9, 20] The experiments are typically ....

....systems. It also analyses the potential causes of difference between the author s and the students capabilities to understand and modify others code. Section 5 summarizes our observations. 2 Related works This section gives an overview of the research efforts in studying the physical processes [1, 22, 23, 25] and the cognitive processes [3, 18, 21] involved in program comprehension and modifications. We consider physical processes as externally observable steps carried out when modifying a software. In contrast, cognitive processes are processes active within the mind. 2.1 Physical process models ....

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V. R. Basili and H. D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., SE-8(3):270--283, 1982.

....examine the program bottom up, building up a description of overall program functionality from the computations performed on the specific lines. This can even be done formally, with a mathematical description being given to the computations. Basili and Mills have done this for the ZEROIN program [3], and we summarize their approach in the next subsection. Another possibility is to combine a top down and a bottom up approach. The bottom up approach looks at the mechanics of each statement from the point of view of design decisions made by the programmer while a synchronized, top down process ....

....plans and design patterns as a basis for program understanding. We discuss this relationship in the remainder of the section. 5. 1 Basili and Mills Basili and Mills apply ideas from structured programming and program correctness proofs to the understanding and annotation of computer programs [3]. In particular, they construct a prime program decomposition of the program, define program functions for each prime program, build a data reference table describing the uses of each program variable, and then synthesize a program correctness proof demonstrating exactly how the program ....

Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills. "Understanding and Documenting Programs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270-283, May, 1982.

....detection rates by modifying the structure of the software inspection process will produce little improvement. Researchers should therefore concentrate on improving the small team single session process by finding better techniques for reviewers to carry it out (e.g. systematic reading techniques[1] for the preparation step, meetingless techniques[9, 17, 11] for the collection step, etc. 29 7 Future Work 7.1 Framework For Further Study Our study revealed a number of influences affecting variation in the data, some internal and some external to the inspection process. Internal sources ....

Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270--283, May 1982.

....and experience for the reviewers. How do these effects interact with the process techniques being used Clearly, more experimentation is needed to address these questions. Also, we should not neglect research to find better techniques with which to review (e.g. systematic reading techniques[1] for the preparation step, meetingless techniques[10, 20, 13] for the collection step, etc. 7 Future Work 7.1 Framework For Further Study Our study revealed a number of influences affecting variation in the data, some internal and some external to the inspection process. Internal sources ....

Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270--283, May 1982.

....read a program. One alternative is to examine the program bottom up, building up a description of overall program functionality from the computations performed on the specific lines. This can even be done formally, with a mathematical description being given to the computations. Basili and Mills [2] have done this for the ZEROIN program, and we summarize their approach in the next subsection. Another possibility is to combine a top down and a bottom up approach. The bottom up approach looks at the mechanics of each statement from the point of view of design decisions made by the programmer ....

Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills. "Understanding and Documenting Programs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270-283, May, 1982.

....detection rates by modifying the structure of the software inspection process will produce little improvement. Researchers should therefore concentrate on improving the small team single session process by finding better techniques for reviewers to carry it out (e.g. systematic reading techniques[1] for the preparation step, meetingless techniques[10, 18, 12] for the collection step, etc. 7 Future Work 7.1 Framework For Further Study Our study revealed a number of influences affecting variation in the data, some internal and some external to the inspection process. Internal sources ....

Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270--283, May 1982.

....code and conditionals, automatically constructing the pre and postconditions is straightforward; loops, however, cause problems. Understanding a loop requires constructing a predicate that describes its typical operation. Automated techniques for this task do not currently exist. Basili and Mills [74] describe the manual use of specification extraction to help understand a program. 75] describes attempts to automate this process. The CICS project [76] in England used a related technique to support the complete reengineering of a large transaction processing system. E. Business Rule ....

V. R. Basili and H. D. Mills. "Understanding and Documenting Programs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270-283, May 1982.

.... within a procedure: horizontal isolation (i.e. each piece of isolated code is a block of the procedure s text) and vertical isolation (i.e. each piece of isolated code is a set of statements that lie on a same dynamic path of the procedure) The horizontal isolation may be founded on primes [8, 60] and assumes the original procedure to be structured. Although methodologies and tools are available for restructuring software with respect to a set of one in one out primes [6, 14, 36, 111] very often horizontal decomposition is not suitable for isolating functions because of the interleaving ....

V.R. Basili and H.D. Mills, "Understanding and documenting programs", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. SE-8, no. 3, 1982, pp. 270-283.

....that implements part of the analysis process. Letovsky, 1988 ] Other examples of the bottom up approach are the program analyzer component of the Programmer s Apprentice project [ Rich and Wills, 1990 ] and the work of Basili and Mills based on control flow analysis and formal documentation. Basili and Mills, 1982 ] The top down approach is championed by Ruven Brooks. In his approach, the program understander attempts to recreate a series of mappings between the application domain and the program. Exploration is driven by expectations derived from the application description. Brooks, 1983 ] There have ....

Basili, V. R. and Mills, H. D. 1982. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE--8(3):270--283.

....PNEAR, IFOUND ) RETURN END Figure 7: The residual code without the distance plan. SPICELIB. Secondary sources of existing software which we also examined are a Cobol database report writing system from the US Army and a program for finding the roots of functions (ZEROIN) presented and analyzed in [1] and [30] We relate our characterization of interleaving to existing concepts in the literature, such as delocalized plans [18] coupling [41] and redistribution of intermediate results [10, 11] We then describe the context in which we are exploring and applying these ideas. Our driving program ....

V.R. Basili and H.D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 8(3):270--283, May 1982.

....(including scheduling difficulties and inadequate air time) Table 1 describes code reading. It uses a small teams; there are multiple sessions; the preparation uses ad hoc techniques; and holding a meeting is optional. Code Reading by Stepwise Abstraction. Code reading by stepwise abstraction [2] is a code reading technique. The inspector decomposes the program into a set of proper subprograms where a proper subprogram is a chunk of code that performs a single function that can be conveniently documented. A proper subprogram implementing a function that cannot be decomposed further is ....

Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, SE-8(3):270--283, May 1982.

....There are many theories as to how program comprehension is performed. Brooks originally proposed the idea that comprehension is essentially a maintainer reconstructing the mappings that the programmer originally created [Bro83] The program understanding process may proceed in a bottom up[BM82, Bro83, Pen87] or top down[SAE88] manner, or a combination of both[Let86, vMV93] depending on the available cues, the type of maintenance[vMV93] and the maintainer s syntactic and semantic knowledge base[YB93] The process might also be systematic an attempt to understand the entire program, ....

V.R. Basili and H.D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Computer, Oct 1982.

....(SPICELIB) written in Fortran by programmers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for analyzing data sent back from space missions. The software performs calculations in the domain of solar system geometry. ffl A program for finding the roots of functions (ZEROIN) presented and analyzed in [1] and [22] The goal of the paper is to characterize the interleaving problem, relating it to existing concepts in the literature, such as delocalized plans [15] coupling [29] and redistribution of intermediate results [8, 9] The paper presents and categorizes examples of types of interleaving ....

V.R. Basili and H.D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 8(3):270--283, May 1982.

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V. R. Basili and H. D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., SE-8(3):270--283, 1982.

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V.R. Basili and H.D. Mills. Understanding and documenting programs. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 8(3) May 1982.

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Victor R. Basili and Harlan D. Mills, "Understanding and Documenting Programs," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-8, No. 3, May 1982.

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V.R. Basili and H.D. Mills, "Understanding and documenting programs", IEEE Trans Software Engineering 8, pp. 270-283 (1982).

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