A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis

Preprint of paper published in: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 35 (5), 2009; doi:10.1109/TSE.2009.28 Program comprehension is an important activity in software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. The study of a program's execution, known as dynamic analysis, has become a common...

Using Aspect Orientation in Legacy Environments for Reverse Engineering using Dynamic Analysis: An Industrial Experience Report

Preprint of article published in: Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier), 82 (4), 2009; doi:10.1016/j.jss.2008.09.031 This paper reports on the challenges of using aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to aid in re-engineering a legacy C application. More specifically, we describe how AOP helps in the important reverse engineering step which...

Automatic Identification of Key Classes in a Software System Using Webmining Techniques

Preprint of article published in: Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice (Wiley), 20 (6), 2008; doi:10.1002/smr.370 Software engineers new to a project are often stuck sorting through hundreds of classes in order to find those few classes that offer a significant insight into the inner workings of the software...

Understanding Execution Traces Using Massive Sequence and Circular Bundle Views

The use of dynamic information to aid in software understanding is a common practice nowadays. One of the many approaches concerns the comprehension of execution traces. A major issue in this context is scalability: due to the vast amounts of information, it is a very difficult task to successfully find your way through such traces without...

On How Developers Test Open Source Software Systems

Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created — and maintained — synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by exploring a project’s versioning system, code coverage reports and size-metrics. Three open source case studies...

Visualizing Testsuites to Aid in Software Understanding

Agile software development methods such as eXtreme Programming have brought renewed attention to testing during the software development process, both as a quality assurance method and as a form of live documentation. It is for this reason that a software system’s testsuite is an ideal starting point for gaining knowledge about its inner...