A little knowledge can go a long way towards program understanding

Abstract

Large, complex software systems are hard to learn and navigate. In an ideal environment, documentation can help in this process. However the latter is usually out of date and hard to use. Others have proposed using large knowledge bases to model software systems, however these are very, extensive to build and may be as unmaintainable as the code. We propose instead to use a highly circumscribed, small, conceptual knowledge base, whose purpose is to help the apprentice navigate a software system, and facilitate search within the code. We present our vision, and some initial experiments which involve building such a knowledge base in a semiautomated way.