"Automatic Program Understanding Empirical Studies"

Improved maintenance tools with deeper, human-like program understanding can be created using automatic program understanding and programming knowledge. We propose to evaluate the potential contribution of UNPROG, a unique and practical automatic program understander. UNPROG recognizes abstract programming concepts like "read-process loop" in real world programs. Empirical studies will be conducted to quantify its performance in a program population and maintenance task of interest to the sponsor. Our work will provide methodology, results and interpretation which will allow the sponsor to monitor, evaluate and apply this important enabling, dual-use technology.