Separating architectural concerns to ease program understanding

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an iterative, user-guided approach to program understanding based on a framework for analyzing and visualizing software systems. The framework is built around a pluggable and extensible set of clues about a given problem domain, execution environment, and/or programming language. The approach leverages two orthogonal architectural views of a system and describes how a proper identification of boundaries for separate concerns helps in reasoning about the system.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Management