A workbench for program comprehension during software maintenance

The paper describes the research carried out into the process of program comprehension during software maintenance within the EUREKA project REM (Reverse Engineering and Maintenance). Tools to aid maintenance programmers to achieve and document an overall interpretation of the system being maintained, as well as a deep understanding of the fine details of the source code, are presented. The cognition model assumed exploits both the top down and the bottom up approaches: program comprehension is intended as an iterative process of guessing, constructing hypotheses and verifying them This process is supported by providing maintenance programmers with a flexible system for querying source code and testing hypotheses against the evidence in the code. Several facilities generate new documents at the design and specification level, thus allowing maintenance programmers to record the knowledge gained for future use.