Abstract

The process of understanding a source code in a high-level programming language is a complex cognitive task. The provision of helpful decision aid subsystems would be of great benefit to software maintainers. Given a library of program plan templates, generating a partial understanding of a piece of software source code can be shown to correspond to the construction of mappings between segments of the source code and particular program plans represented in a library of domain source programs (plans). These mappings can be used as part of the larger task of reverse engineering source code, to facilitate many software engineering tasks such as software reuse, and for program maintenance. We present a novel model of program understanding using constraint satisfaction. The model composes a partial global picture of source program code by transforming knowledge about the problem domain and the program structure into constraints. These constraints facilitate the efficient construction of ma...

Citations