Software applications developed in recent times are written in lakhs of lines of code and have become increasingly complex in terms of structure, behaviour and functionality. At the same time, development life cycles of such applications reveal a tendency of becoming increasingly shorter, due to factors such as rapid evolution of supporting and enabling technologies. As a consequence, an increasing portion of software development cost shifts from the creation of new artefacts to the adaptation of existing ones. A key component of this activity is the understanding of the design, operation, and behaviour of existing artefacts of the code. For instance, in the software industry, it is estimated that maintenance costs exceed 80% of the total costs of a software product’s lifecycle, and software understanding accounts for as much as half of these maintenance costs. Software Comprehension is a key subtask of software maintenance and evolution phase, which is driven by the need to change software. This paper will help in enhancing the ability of the developers to read and comprehend large pieces of software in an organized manner, even in the absence of adequate documentation by using existing open source tools. It highlights the program elements, components, its analytical solutions for understanding, comprehensions and extension.

beautifiers, profilers, slicers, top-down, version control systems

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