The AMES approach to application understanding: a case study

AMES (Application Management Environments Support), ESPRIT Project no. 8156, is concerned not simply with program comprehension but with application understanding. This paper considers the difficulties of gaining an understanding of the detailed functioning of an application in order to perform maintenance, and describes a method and tool support which have been developed to guide a maintainer through this learning process. Our method uses a theoretical background based on learning theory, with our tools aiming to improve upon the approach of many existing program comprehension toolsets by linking related aspects of the application´s documentation to form a united graph. Results of the application of our toolset are described and their implications discussed. Finally, we describe some of the future directions that we will be taking based on the results that we have obtained