Program understanding: Challenge for the 1990s

In the Program Understanding Project at IBM's Research Division, work began in late 1986 on tools which could help programmers in two key areas: static analysis (reading the code) and dynamic analysis (running the code). The work is reported in the companion papers by Cleveland and by Pazel in this issue. The history and background which motivated and which led to the start of this research on tools to assist programmers in understanding existing program code is reported here.