Integrating Runtime Values with Source Code to Facilitate Program Comprehension
This work addresses the difficulty of understanding abstract source code for software developers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing debugging and documentation methods.
The research tackled the problem of program comprehension by designing three techniques that integrate runtime values with source code, including a debugger extension for searching strings in expressions, generating documentation with examples, and augmenting IDE code lines with sample variable values.
An inherently abstract nature of source code makes programs difficult to understand. In our research, we designed three techniques utilizing concrete values of variables and other expressions during program execution. RuntimeSearch is a debugger extension searching for a given string in all expressions at runtime. DynamiDoc generates documentation sentences containing examples of arguments, return values and state changes. RuntimeSamp augments source code lines in the IDE (integrated development environment) with sample variable values. In this post-doctoral article, we briefly describe these three approaches and related motivational studies, surveys and evaluations. We also reflect on the PhD study, providing advice for current students. Finally, short-term and long-term future work is described.