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A Knowledge-Based Approach to Program Understanding

  • Book
  • © 1995

Overview

Authors:
  1. Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz

    1. Cairo University, Egypt

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Victor R. Basili

    1. University of Maryland, USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Part of the book series: The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science (SECS, volume 325)

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
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  2. Introduction

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 1-4

  3. Background

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 5-18

  4. Overview and Basic Definitions

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 19-22

  5. Analysis of Flat Loops

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 23-40

  6. Analysis of Nested Loops

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 41-59

  7. Discussion of the Analysis Approach

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 61-65

  8. Case Study

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 67-75

  9. Prototype Implementation

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 77-81

  10. Applications

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 83-88

  11. Conclusions

    • Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz, Victor R. Basili
    Pages 89-92

  12. Back Matter

    Pages 93-119
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Keywords

About this book

Program understanding plays an important role in nearly all software related tasks. It is vital to the development, maintenance and reuse activities. Program understanding is indispensable for improving the quality of software development. Several development activities such as code reviews, debugging and some testing approaches require programmers to read and understand programs. Maintenance activities cannot be performed without a deep and correct understanding of the component to be maintained. Program understanding is vital to the reuse of code components because they cannot be utilized without a clear understanding of what they do. If a candidate reusable component needs to be modified, an understanding how it is designed is also required. of This monograph presents a· knowledge-based approach to the automation of program understanding. This approach generates rigorous program documentation mechanically by combining and building on strengths of a practical program decomposition method, the axiomatic correctness notation, and the knowledge­ based analysis approaches. More specifically, this approach documents programs by generating first order predicate logic annotations of their loops. In this approach, loops are classified according to their complexity levels. Based on this taxonomy, variations on the basic analysis approach that best fit each of the different classes are described. In general, mechanical annotation of loops is performed by first decomposing them using data flow analysis. This decomposition encapsulates interdependent statements in events, which can be analyzed individually.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Cairo University, Egypt

    Salwa K. Abd-El-Hafiz

  • University of Maryland, USA

    Victor R. Basili

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