A Knowledge-Based Approach to Program Understanding / Edition 1

by Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili

Overview

Program understanding plays an important role in nearly all software related tasks. It is vital to the development, maintenance and reuse activities. Program understanding is indispensable for improving the quality of software development. Several development activities such as code reviews, debugging and some testing approaches require programmers to read and understand programs. Maintenance activities cannot be performed without a deep and correct understanding of the component to be maintained. Program understanding is vital to the reuse of code components because they cannot be utilized without a clear understanding of what they do. If a candidate reusable component needs to be modified, an understanding how it is designed is also required. of This monograph presents a knowledge-based approach to the automation of program understanding. This approach generates rigorous program documentation mechanically by combining and building on strengths of a practical program decomposition method, the axiomatic correctness notation, and the knowledge­ based analysis approaches. More specifically, this approach documents programs by generating first order predicate logic annotations of their loops. In this approach, loops are classified according to their complexity levels. Based on this taxonomy, variations on the basic analysis approach that best fit each of the different classes are described. In general, mechanical annotation of loops is performed by first decomposing them using data flow analysis. This decomposition encapsulates interdependent statements in events, which can be analyzed individually.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792396055
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	07/31/1995
Series:	The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science , #325
Edition description:	1995
Pages:	119
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.01(d)

Table of Contents

1 Introduction.- 1.1 Research Goals.- 1.2 Research Approach.- 1.3 Outline.- 2 Background.- 2.1 Loop Analysis.- 2.2 Program Analysis and Understanding.- 3 Overview and Basic Definitions.- 3.1 Definitions.- 3.2 A Loop Taxonomy.- 4 Analysis of Flat Loops.- 4.1 Normalization of the Loop Representation.- 4.2 Decomposition of the Loop Body.- 4.3 Formation of the Loop Events.- 4.4 A Knowledge Base of Plans.- 4.5 Analysis of the Events.- 5 Analysis of Nested Loops.- 5.1 Definitions.- 5.2 Analysis of Inner Loops.- 5.3 Representation of Inner Loops Analysis Results.- 5.4 Analysis of Outer Loops.- 5.5 Adaptation of Inner Loops Specifications.- 6 Discussion of the Analysis Approach.- 7 Case Study.- 7.1 Objectives.- 7.2 Method.- 7.3 Results and Analysis.- 8 Prototype Implementation.- 8.1 Design.- 8.2 Operation.- 9 Applications.- 9.1 Assisting Maintenance and Reuse.- 9.2 Assisting Formal Development.- 10 Conclusions.- 10.1 Summary of Approach.- 10.2 Observations.- 10.3 Future Work.- References.

Editorial Reviews

Offers an approach to the automation of program understanding that generates rigorous program documentation mechanically by combining and building on strengths of a practical method for decomposing programs, the axiomatic correctness notation, and knowledge-based analysis approaches. More specifically, it generates first order predicate logic annotations of a program's loops, then classifies the loops according to their complexity. Understanding a program is necessary for such tasks in software development, as code reviews, debugging, some testing approaches, and re-using code sequences. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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