Some Experiments Toward Understanding How Program Plan Recognition Algorithms Scale

Steven Woods and Alex Quilici.

Abstract

Over the past decade, researchers in program understanding have formulated many program understanding algorithms but have published few studies of their relative scalability. Consequently, it is difficult to understand the relative limitations of these algorithms and to determine whether the field of program understanding is making progress. This paper attempts to address this deficiency by formalizing the search strategies of several different program understanding algorithms as constraint satisfaction problems, and by presenting some preliminary empirical scalability results for these constraint-based implementations. These initial results suggest that, at least under certain conditions, constraint-based program understanding is close to being applicable to real-world programs.

Awards, Comments

This paper was selected as the 1996 WCRE Outstanding Contribution.

Copyright Notice

Copyright 1996 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE-96), September, 1996, Monterey, California, USA. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE.

The Paper