Study On Program Readability Analysis And Summarization Techniques

Program comprehension plays a key role in the process of software development and maintenance throughout the life cycle of software development. Program readability analysis and summarization techniques are important for program understanding, which can help developers effectively understand and maintain the program at hand.If a program has good readability, developers can quickly understand the program; while on the other hand, developers will feel difficult to understand the program with low readability, especially for those programs with few comments. Hence, automatic analysis of program readability and program summarization techniques are necessary to help developers quickly understand and maintain the program at hand.To analyze the program readability, two methods are proposed in this thesis. One is to analyze a program based on the WordNet. In this approach, method annotation and keywords in the comments are extracted first. Then, they are matched based on the synonym matching based on WordNet for program readability analysis. In addition, we extract the words from the comments that can well reflect the identifiers in a method. Based on the proposed similarity measure, program readability can also be analyzed.Finally, this thesis proposes a program summarization approach that automatically summarizes the packages in a program, which also considers the syntax relation and labels in the program. The generated package summarization can help developers understand the software system more efficiently and effectively in a high level.