REGoLive: building a Web site comprehension tool by extending GoLive

Traditionally, program comprehension functionality is implemented with stand-alone tools. As a result, software engineers typically have to switch between various tools during comprehension activities. Each of these tools has its own idiosyncratic user interface and interaction paradigm, causing an unfavorable learning curve. As a result, many program comprehension tools fail to be adopted. Software engineering activities that involve program comprehension (e.g., maintenance) require the use of forward engineering tools (e.g., compilers) as well as reverse engineering tools (e.g., class hierarchy visualizers). Thus, extending forward engineering tools such as IDEs (e.g., Eclipse) or Web authoring tools (e.g., GoLive) by seamlessly adding program comprehension functionality helps software engineers and improves the adoption of comprehension functionality. In this paper, we introduce an adoption-centric tool development approach that leverages a Web authoring tool, GoLive, by grafting functionality for Web site comprehension on top. The benefits and drawbacks of this approach from the tool-user's as well as the tool-builder's perspective are discussed.