Simplicity: a key engineering concept for program understanding

One of the most significant problems for existing program comprehension methods is its scalability. We introduce a new technique to make the scalability possible. In particular, we advocate the concept of "simplicity" for program understanding. We first propose a simplified semantic network as domain knowledge representation; we then introduce a linear and domain-oriented program partitioning method which can partition a huge program into self-contained program modules so that the recovery of domain knowledge can be carried out within smaller program space. We also introduce a set of rules for recovering domain knowledge from C code followed by a theoretical analysis on these algorithms. A case study on programming style based program partitioning method is given. Finally, comparisons with other work are made and a conclusion is drawn.