Understanding program structure and behavior

A large software system usually has structure in it. Several functions work together to accomplish a certain task, and several tasks are grouped together to perform a bigger task. In order to understand this division, one has to consult the documentations or read through the source code. However, the documentations are usually incomplete and outdated, while code inspection is tedious and impractical. Algorithms have been proposed that automatically group functions with similar functionality. In this thesis I will present LogiView, an algorithm that presents an organizational view of the functions. This view will ease the process of understanding the structures in the program, identifying functions with related tasks, and separating the functions into logical groups. I will also present a methodology of analyzing the function names in the program. This method leverages the result of the LogiView algorithm and identifies the names that are most relevant to the functionality of the program. Given a set of programs that are known to have same functionality, this method extracts the similarity in the function names and builds a dictionary of the names that are semantically related to the functionality.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Dharmawan, Sie Hendrata

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Saman Amarasinghe.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37204

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37204