Research And Implementation On Program Comprehension Supporting Environment Based On Cognitive Process

The difficulty in analyzing and comprehending software systems specially these large scale complicated software systems is unthinkable, which brings about much trouble in software maintenance and evolution and also increases the expenditure for a software system rapidly. Program comprehension supporting tool is aid-giving environment in software analyzing and program comprehension which can assist in program understanding and software maintenance effectively. Moreover, it also can provide much essential support for some software reverse engineering tasks.The research is performed to explore how to design efficient and applicable auxiliary tool for program comprehension. During the researching process, the cognitive comprehension is chosen as the theoretical guideline and the daily working mode of software engineering in software maintenance is chosen as the researching scene, so some deep investigation on the cognitive and adoptive support for the program comprehension supporting tool has been gained. Based on the deep exploration on cognitive theory and working mode of software engineering, a program comprehension supporting framework has been presented, which contains fifteen design items in cognitive and adaptive requirement and offers some good guidance for the program comprehension supporting tool design and evaluation. In addition, a program comprehension supporting tool called PCSE(Program Comprehension Supporting Environment) has been designed using the framework as a guide. From cognitive and adaptive support aspects with eleven key points and choosing SHriMP and TkSee as the comparison objects, an evaluation is established to demonstrate the advantages and features embodied by the supporting framework and system.