The concept assignment problem in program understanding

Concept assignment is a process of recognizing concepts within a computer program and building up an understanding of the program by relating the recognized concepts to portions of the program, its operational context and to one another. The problem of discovering individual human oriented concepts and assigning them to their implementation oriented counterparts for a given program is the concept assignment problem. The authors argue that the solution to this problem requires methods that have a strong plausible reasoning component. They illustrate these ideas through example scenarios using an existing design recovery system called DESIRE. DESIRE is evaluated based on its usage on real-world problems over the years. >