Scalable Program Comprehension for Analyzing Complex Defects

We describe the query-model-refine (QMR) approach for retrieving and modeling information for program comprehension. The QMR approach allows the flexibility to design and execute application-specific problem-solving strategies to suit particular program comprehension goals. The QMR approach has been used for building a number of program comprehension tools for different applications: interactive automatic parallelization, business rule analysis, auditing safety-critical control software, and defect analysis. This presentation will be about a program comprehension tool called Atlas and we will show its use for analyzing complex defects.