Program Understanding

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Program Understanding

• Steve Chenoweth
• CSSE 375, Rose-Hulman
• Based on Don Bagerts 2006 Lecture

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Today

• Finish class intros
• Introduce Jon Labayo and Sandor Pethes of RHV
• An opening assignment on the term project One
  minute talks, next Thursday!
• Talk about Program Understanding (M 6)
• Install GCC and do Program Understanding
  Exercise, using todays Quiz as a guideline

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Finish Class Intros

• Who you are
• Whats your domain track?
• Something interesting you just did
• Something youd like from this course

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Introduce Jon and Sandor

• Jon Labayo
• Jon is a project engineer at Rose-Hulman
  Ventures, working with both hardware and
  software. He earned his B.S. in computer
  engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of
  Technology. He has experience in both application
  level software development and embedded
  hardware/software design, ranging from image and
  audio processing to data acquisition, analysis,
  and motion control systems.

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Introduce Jon and Sandor

• Sandor Pethes
• Sandor is currently working as a project engineer
  for software development teams. His area of
  expertise is in software engineering. Sandor has
  an interest in computer graphics, Linux systems,
  and embedded systems. He earned his B.S. in
  computer science at Rose-Hulman Institute of
  Technology in 2002.

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The term project An opening assignment

• Look at One-minute project talks on the
  schedule, to turn in by Wednesday night, give in
  class on Thursday
• Each person does one
• Then well have time for you to discuss project
  ideas, in class on Friday
• And turn in projects youre interested in
• Team assignments will be made by us!

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A Program Comprehension Process Model

• Read about the program
• Read the source code
• Run the program
• Return to steps 1 or 2 as necessary.
• ? Look at C program example.

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Program Comprehension Strategies

• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Chunking
• Opportunistic
• Combination of top-down and bottom-up
• How can you avoid it becoming ad hoc?

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Factors that AffectProgram Understanding

• Expertise
• Implementation issues
• Naming style
• Comments
• Decomposition Mechanism
• Documentation
• Organization and Presentation

Mixed research results on many of these!
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Lets dig into some C code

• Install GCC -- See GCC Install instructions
• Do Program Understanding Exercise -- Use todays
  Quiz as a further guideline
• If youre new to C, this is also a very brief
  intro to the language