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 technique in this respect and has received substantial attention from the research community, particularly over the last decade. These efforts have resulted in a large research body of which currently there exists no comprehensive overview. This paper reports on a systematic literature survey aimed at the identification and structuring of research on program comprehension through dynamic analysis. From a research body consisting of 4,795 articles published in 14 relevant venues between July 1999 and June 2008 and the references therein, we have systematically selected 176 articles and characterized them in terms of four main facets: activity, target, method, and evaluation. The resulting overview offers insight in what constitutes the main contributions of the field, supports the task of identifying gaps and opportunities, and has motivated our discussion of several important research directions that merit additional consideration in the near future.

A large amount of research is devoted to software evolution and program understanding, but these topics are often neglected in software engineering curricula. The CCSE initiative from IEEE/ACM proposes guidelines for the future. At the ICSM'02 conference, a panel was held to establish what should be taught in the future. This working session focuses on what is being taught and what will be taught in the near future. The goals include (1) to share experiences in teaching software evolution and program understanding, (2) to establish the state of the practice and (3) to identify future directions.