On the role of hypotheses during opportunistic understanding while porting large scale code

Hypotheses are major drivers of program comprehension. We report on a case study observing an experienced software engineer porting a large software system and the role of hypotheses in accomplishing the porting task. Observations confirm some existing theoretic models and experimental findings, but not all. While generalization based on a case study is of necessity limited, the results could be the basis for further experiments. They also point to information that mould help novices to become experts faster