Posts tagged as:

evolution

An Introduction to Reverse Engineering

January 20, 2010

Reverse engineering is a process of analysing a subject system to identify the system’s components and their interrelationships and to create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction.

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What Not To Do When Maintaining Software Applications

January 20, 2010

“Software maintenace: it’s a dirty job; but someone’s gotta do it”
Anonymous Software Maintainer, 2010.
Software maintenance is a task often off-loaded to junior developers, while in theory, the repercussions and difficulties associated with maintenance suggest it should be performed by the most capable of programmers. A skilled programmer can transform a project whereas a copy-pasta [...]

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Program Comprehension Strategies

January 18, 2010

Our understanding of something depends on our ability to form a mental representation, which serves as a working model.
The concept of a thing being understood is termed the target system and its mental representation is termed a mental model.
The completeness and accuracy of a model depends on the users information and experience.

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An Introduction to Program Comprehension

January 18, 2010

Program comprehension during software maintenance involves the acquisition of knowledge about programs, as well as accompanying documentation and operating procedures.
The costs of performing program comprehension have been widely cited as being between 50-90% of overall cost of performing maintenance [Standish84], i.e. that much time is spent on understanding the code rather than just making [...]

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