A Synergistic Approach to Program Comprehension

Program comprehension involves the process of extracting properties from a program in order to achieve a better understanding of the software system. The most common approaches are code-based with focus primarily on the program code. More attention needs to be given to information encoded in comments and identifiers and the valuable clues they may provide. This paper describes a technique that combines a code-based program understanding approach with a comment understanding approach. The goal is to match the comments and identifiers to the code in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the software under analysis. The method has application to software development and maintenance. It can also be used as an instructional tool for software students