Program Understanding Models: An Historical Overview and a Classification

Eric Harth, Philippe Dugerdil

2017

Abstract

During the last three decades several hundred papers have been published on the broad topic of “program comprehension”. The goal was always the same: to develop models and tools to help developers with program understanding during program maintenance. However few authors targeted the more fundamental question: “what is program understanding” or, other words, proposed a model of program understanding. Then we reviewed the proposed program understanding models. We found the papers to be classifiable in three period of time in accordance with the following three subtopics: the process, the tools and the goals. Interestingly, studying the fundamental goal came after the tools. We conclude by highlighting that it is required to go back to the fundamental question to have any chance to develop effective tools to help with program understanding which is the most costly part of program maintenance.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Harth E. and Dugerdil P. (2017). Program Understanding Models: An Historical Overview and a Classification . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-262-2, pages 402-413. DOI: 10.5220/0006465504020413

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft17,
author={Eric Harth and Philippe Dugerdil},
title={Program Understanding Models: An Historical Overview and a Classification},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2017},
pages={402-413},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006465504020413},
isbn={978-989-758-262-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Program Understanding Models: An Historical Overview and a Classification
SN - 978-989-758-262-2
AU - Harth E.
AU - Dugerdil P.
PY - 2017
SP - 402
EP - 413
DO - 10.5220/0006465504020413