Early field experience with the Software Reconnaissance technique for program comprehension

Software Reconnaissance is a dynamic analysis technique to help programmers locate code that they need to understand, fix, or enhance in an unfamiliar system. The technique was originally motivated by comments by industrial maintainers about the need for better ways of locating software features in large systems. It was then prototyped in a university setting and an initial tool called RECON was developed. The paper describes four case studies applying Reconnaissance to three different industrial programs of moderate size. Reconnaissance seems to be effective in finding "places to start looking" for maintainers of unfamiliar code. It can also be used to recover a traceability relation between program features and program code that may help identify design patterns. The case studies are the initial phase of an ongoing technology transfer project of the Software Engineering Research Center, to make Software Reconnaissance into a usable industrial technique.