Research On Documentation Generation Technology In Porgram Understanding

With the rapid development of software industry, maintenance becomes an important topic. Understanding and modifying is the core of software maintenance. Program understanding becomes the most costly part of software maintenance by factors such as size and complexity of the program. Documentation can effectively assist the software engineers to understand the program. However, documentation is often absent, outdated, incomplete or contain mistakes in practice. The study on implementing documentation automatic generation has research values and significance.This paper starts with the concepts of program understanding and reverse engineering. The related research work, theories and technologies corresponding to documentation automatic generation is reviewed. Based on the researchers' work, an approach on the design of documentation generation system is presented. Information storage and the format of graphical documents are analyzed. The content of this paper includes: (1) The design of documentation generation system. Generating documents at various abstract levels is enabled. (2) Information storage. The information extracted by the parser is stored in GXL format, which supports the information exchanging between different reverse engineering tools. (3) Representation of graphs. Graphs are represented in SVG, which can aid the exploring of complex graphs and reduce storage space.