Title :
Enhancing program comprehension with recovered state models
Author :
Some, Stephane S. ; Lethbridge, Timothy C.
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Inf. Technol. & Eng., Ottawa, Ont., Canada
Abstract :
State transition machines are high-level behavior descriptions often used as modeling tools for the design and implementation of a large class of software systems. Some of the state transition machine implementation approaches are such that the static structure of the resulting code closely matches that of the original state transition machines. Therefore, having a representation of the original state transition machines is likely to improve the corresponding code understandability. We present an approach supported by a prototype tool, to extract state transition machines by static analysis of source code. An objective of this work is to enhance program comprehension with visual representations of the behavior of the programs being analyzed.
Keywords :
graph theory; program diagnostics; program visualisation; reverse engineering; code understandability; high-level behavior descriptions; modeling tools; program comprehension; recovered state models; software systems; source code; state transition machines; static analysis; static structure; visual representations; Data mining; Design engineering; Information technology; Navigation; Object oriented modeling; Prototypes; Software maintenance; Software prototyping; Software systems; Software tools;
Conference_Titel :
Program Comprehension, 2002. Proceedings. 10th International Workshop on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1495-2
DOI :
10.1109/WPC.2002.1021325