A Code Summarization Approach for Object Oriented Programs

The software maintenance process is not an easy job, especially when the source code becomes more complex and less documented. Software developers and engineers may spend plenty of time to understand the structures and features of the source code in order to maintain their software projects. Using an automated code summarization technique is a key factor to save time and cost of the maintenance process. Generating descriptive documents from the source code helps the software developers to understand their software. In this paper, a code summarization framework is proposed to document the source code. A set of software features are extracted and displayed to the developers based on mapping the target source code segments to an XML representation. The proposed framework has been conducted on an open source project to evaluate its effectiveness. The generated results showed that the proposed approach is useful in understanding the different structural aspects of the source code.