Task Oriented Software Understanding

Abstract

The main factors that affect software understanding are the complexity of the problem solved by the program, the program text, the user's mental ability and experience and the task being performed. The paper describes a planning approach solution to the software understanding problem that focuses on the user's task and expertise. First, user questions about software artifacts have been studied and the most commonly asked questions are identified. These questions are organized into a question model and procedures for answering them are developed. Then, the patterns in user questions while performing certain tasks have been studied and these patterns are used to build generic task models. The explanation system uses these task models in several ways. The task model, along with a user model, is used to generate explanations tailored to the user's task and expertise. In addition, the task model allows the system to provide explicit task support in its interface.