The concept assignment problem in program understanding

• Published in: Proceedings of 1993 15th International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 482 - 498
• Main Authors: Biggerstaff, T.J., Mitbander, B.G., Webster, D.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE Comput. Soc. Press 1993
• Subjects: Assembly; Automatic control; Communication system control; Context; Humans; Maintenance engineering; Microelectronics; Pattern recognition; Reverse engineering; Vocabulary
• ISBN: 9780818637001; 0818637005
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1109/ICSE.1993.346017

Concept assignment is a process of recognizing concepts within a computer program and building up an understanding of the program by relating the recognized concepts to portions of the program, its operational context and to one another. The problem of discovering individual human oriented concepts and assigning them to their implementation oriented counterparts for a given program is the concept assignment problem. The authors argue that the solution to this problem requires methods that have a strong plausible reasoning component. They illustrate these ideas through example scenarios using an existing design recovery system called DESIRE. DESIRE is evaluated based on its usage on real-world problems over the years.< >