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.