Finding the Right Needles in Hay Helping Program Comprehension of Large Software Systems

Maintenance of complex software systems can be done by software engineers only after they understand well the existing code. Program comprehension is supported by documentation - either developer documentation or reverse engineered. What is most often missing is a short document providing the new user with useful information to start with - an executive summary. In this work we propose a tool to automatically extract such a summary, by identifying the most important classes of a system. Our approach relies on techniques of static analysis of dependencies and graph-based ranking. Experiments on a set of real systems show good results.