Authors: Francoise Balmas and Harald Wertz
Abstract :
In order to get a better understanding of what program
understanding means, we are conducting experiments to observe programmers
reading programs. Our primary concern is to identify which kind of
information programmers are likely to search for in the code, to skip over or to miss.
Secondly, we are interested to know how people construct
their understanding of the program from the information they get and
how they represent it, as we are convinced that this would
help us to build automatic program understanding tools.
Based on first observations, we identified a preliminary list of useful information
to provide programmers with and we constructed
prototypical programs that compute and display this information.
This process
applies iteratively, as each new information view helps us to observe
further how program understanding is built, therefore to construct further
tools.
In this paper, we describe the experiments we did along with the
programs we implemented on the basis of our observations, we outline the
ways in which
information and views are built, and we
evaluate the
information they provide as well as our approach to understand program
understanding.
Ce papier est disponible sur demande à fb@ai.univ-paris8.fr.