Abstract

Program comprehension is a central activity during software maintenance, evolution and reuse. Some reports estimate that up to 60-70% of the maintenance effort is spent in trying to understand code. Poor design, unstructured programming methods, and crisis-driven maintenance can contribute to poor quality code, which in turn affects program comprehension. The implications are that improvements to software development process will require improvements to software maintenance. These process improvements should facilitate comprehension of existing programs. The goal of program comprehension is to acquire sufficient knowledge about a software system so that it can evolve in a disciplined manner. Program comprehension is an emerging interest area within the software engineering field. In this report, the objective is to survey and categorize program comprehension techniques. We also present the MOOSE project to provide an example to illustrate some of these comprehension survey and categorization.