Automated assistance to program understanding

Software maintenance requires the understanding of existing code, determining whether to make changes, assessing the impact of modifications, rebuilding code after alterations, and regression testing to validate changes. Program understanding is a bottleneck phase when the code to be maintained is invisible which means difficult to get needed information. This paper suggests a method for supporting program understanding by bottom-up driven and code-oriented view. The toolset includes abstraction mechanism, restructuring capability, ripple effect analysis, chunking guidance, and reuse. It lets the maintenance programmer understand the program effectively, refer to other people´s understanding, analyze the effect of changes, and reusable program segments