Please note: This PhD seminar will take place in DC 2310.
Rafael Ferreira Toledo, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisor: Professor Jo Atlee
As software systems grow larger and more heterogeneous, it becomes more feasible to understand the software through models rather than through the source code. This begs the question of how program-comprehension questions that developers ask when trying to understand, explore, debug, or evolve the source code of an existing software system would apply to software models and analyses of software models. In this seminar, we focus on graphical models of software (including descriptive models of software structure, software behaviour, software factbases), and we map program-comprehension questions to corresponding graph-exploration tasks on such models. We conducted a literature review of program-comprehension questions and classified those questions into categories based on (1) the kinds of information the graphical model would need to include and (2) the kinds of tasks a query engine would need to support in order to facilitate answering such questions. We evaluated our question classification by translating the questions into graph database queries that return the required data in the software model. Our results can help to inform researchers and tool developers on how to support different classes of program-comprehension questions when working with graphical models of software.