Applying Webmining Techniques to Execution Traces to Support the Program Comprehension Process

Well-designed object-oriented programs typically consist of a few key classes that work tightly together to provide the bulk of the functionality. As such, these key classes are excellent starting points for the program comprehension process. We propose a technique that uses webmining principles on execution traces to discover these important and tightly interacting classes. Based on two medium-scale case studies – Apache Ant and Jakarta JMeter – and detailed architectural information from its developers, we show that our heuristic does in fact find a sizeable number of the classes deemed important by the developers. Keywords Reverse engineering, dynamic analysis, webmining, program comprehension

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CSMR
• Authors: Andy Zaidman, Toon Calders, Serge Demeyer, Jan Paredaens
• Keywords: CSMR 2005, Key Classes, Program Comprehension, Software Engineering, Well-designed Object-oriented Programs