A Structured Demonstration of Five Program Comprehension Tools: Lessons Learnt

The purpose of this panel is to report on a structured demonstration for comparing program comprehension tools. Five program comprehension tool designers applied their tools to a set of maintenance tasks on a common subject system. By applying a variety of reverse engineering techniques to a predefined set of tasks, the tools can be compared using a common playing field. A secondary topic of discussion will address the development of “guinea pig” systems and how to use them in a structured demonstration for evaluating software tools. 1 Background Many tools to support program comprehension have been developed in both industry and research during the past few years. Although these tools share the common goal of simplifying the task of understanding large software systems, they have different functionality and different approaches. Various tools extract system artifacts and their relationships at different levels of granularity, ranging from fine-grained data at the syntax tree leve...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Susan Elliott Sim, Margaret-Anne D. Storey, Andreas Winter
• Keywords: Program Comprehension Tools, Software Engineering, Structured Demonstration, Tool, WCRE 2000