Combined Code Understanding and Comment Understanding

Program comprehension necessitates the process of extracting properties from a program in order to achieve a better discernment of the software system under study. In this paper, the authors present a combined code and comment/identifier program comprehension approach that provides twice the input of existing approaches - whereas the latter approaches customarily focus on either code or comments but not both. The authors' code understanding approach is a heuristic approach. It is based on the same knowledge-based inferencing engine employed by a mature program understanding engine that examines comment and identifiers.