Evolving Ispell: a case study of program understanding for reuse

Text processing has proven helpful in a number of software engineering tasks. We discuss how a morphological analyser for the Italian language, and its associated linguistic resources, have been developed by reusing and evolving an existing system, Ispell, which is an open-source spell-checker. The need to develop such an analyser derives from the need to improve the traceability link recovery process described by G. Antoniol et al. (2000, 2002). This paper shows how the program understanding exercise was useful to develop a system in a specialized application domain in which we had a very limited background knowledge.