Understanding Program Dependencies

ions Program Code with Dependencies Figure 1. A typical process of program understanding will be accumulated to allow the programmer to understand how RECCTR fits into the design abstractions of the overall program. While it is very difficult to describe all the mental processes that go on during the analysis, it is clear that tracing through the chains of dependencies is a large part of the work. Cleveland gives an interesting illustrative scenario of a programmer trying to track down a bug by searching through different views of the program code [Cleveland89]. 1.2. Experiments and Practice in Program Understanding Some experimental work on program comprehension has been reported in the literature. For example, Letovsky and Soloway have done experiments using the "thinking-aloud protocol" in which maintainers describe the mental processes they are using as they perform a task [Letovsky86]. The authors found that a major obstacle to program understanding is the presence of delocalized ..