Ansätze des Programmverstehens

Abstract

Program understanding is the process to aquire knowledgeon a computer program. It is a supposition for debugging,enhancement, re-use, and documentation. There are a fewapproaches that support automatic program understanding.Current approaches can be classified in basic andknowledge-based analyses. Basic analyses do not rely on theapplication domain and any programming knowledge. They areonly based on programming language syntax and semantic.Basic analyses can be distinguished into basic static andbasic dynamic analyses, depending on whether theinformation is gained at compile time or runtime.Knowledge-based analyses dispose of application domainknowledge and programming knowledge. They can be furtherclassified in parsing approaches, if they only fall backupon formal and structural program properties, and informalreasoning, if they use additionally informal knowledge.This paper explains the taxonomy with examples.