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11th IEEE International Workshop
on Program Comprehension


May 10-11, 2003
Hilton Portland Hotel
Portland, Oregon, USA

Co-located at ICSE 2003, the IEEE/ACM 25nd
International Conference on Software Engineering

Keynote Speakers


Sat, May 10, 2003, 8:30 - 10:00 Keynote by Paul Klint, CWI and University of Amsterdam
How Understanding and Restructuring differ from Compiling - a Rewriting Perspective

Sun, May 11, 2003, 8:30 - 10:00 Keynote by James R. Cordy, Queen's University, Canada
Comprehending Reality - Practical Barriers to Industrial Adoption of Software Maintenance Automation


How Understanding and Restructuring differ from Compiling - a Rewriting Perspective

Paul Klint, CWI and University of Amsterdam

Syntactic and semantic analysis are established topics in the area of compiler construction. Their application to the understanding and restructuring of large software systems reveals, however, that they have various shortcomings that need to be addressed. In this paper, we study these shortcomings and propose several solutions. First, grammar recovery and grammar composition are discussed as well as the symbiosis of lexical syntax and context-free syntax. Next, it is shown how a relational calculus can be defined by way of term rewriting and how a fusion of term rewriting and this relational calculus can be obtained to provide semantics-directed querying and restructuring. Finally, we discuss how the distance between concrete syntax and abstract syntax can be minimized for the benefit of restructuring. In particular, we pay attention to origin tracking, a systematic technique to maintain a mapping between the output and the input of the rewriting process. Along the way, opportunities for further research will be indicated.

Comprehending Reality - Practical Barriers to Industrial Adoption of Software Maintenance Automation

James R. Cordy, Queen's University, Canada

Recent years have seen many significant advances in program comprehension and software maintenance automation technology. In spite of the enormous potential savings in software maintenance costs, for the most part adoption of these ideas in industry remains at the experimental prototype stage. In this talk I will explore the practical reasons for industrial resistance to adoption of software maintenance automation. Based on the experience of six years of software maintenance automation services to the financial industry involving more than 4.5 Gloc of code at Legasys Corporation, I will explore a series of social, technical and business misunderstandings that lie at the root of this resistance, outline the Legasys attempts overcome these barriers, and suggest a new approach to software maintenance automation research that is likely to lead to higher levels of industrial acceptance in the future.


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