Supporting Program Understanding by Automatic Indexing of Functionalities in Source Code

Programs in the event-driven style that are typical of mobile and/or web applications are becoming complex and hard to maintain. For the purpose of reducing the burden put on software developers while reading source code to understand its details, we propose a tool for supporting program understanding, named SAIFU. SAIFU automatically extracts implemented functionalities from source code and puts annotations, which we call summaries, to them. SAIFU lets the user focus on the statements of source code and check the implementation details corresponding to each functionality. SAIFU helps the user grasp the behavior and the structure of a whole program by showing a clickable list of the summaries of functionalities. The results of preliminary experiments based on the prototype implementation of SAIFU confirm that the tool is effective for finding out important statements from existing application programs.