MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Annual Abstract, September 2001. Proceedings of MIT Student Oxygen Workshop, July 2001. PostScript , PDF . A Software Archaeologist's Magic Lens.
Program comprehension remains a major bottleneck for software maintenance.
But source code is far from an ideal representation for this task. I propose a system, Dr. Jones, to help a programmer understand an unfamiliar program. Dr. Jones is a magic lens over the program that reveals information that usually requires effort to extract from source code. This information is broken into tightly coupled views of the program's structure and behavior that, taken together, help the programmer build a good mental model of the program. Dr. Jones presents these views as diagrams, to engage the programmer's perception in extracting knowledge about the program.