Introduction to the special issue on program comprehension through dynamic analysis (PCODA)

This special issue on program comprehension through dynamic analysis is tightly related to the international workshop on program comprehension through dynamic analysis (PCODA) series. The aim of PCODA is to bring together researchers and practitioners using dynamic analysis as a basis for their program comprehension and reverse engineering technique(s). Within the reverse engineering community much attention is focused on static analysis, the analysis of the source code of a software system, while dynamic analysis focusing on runtime properties of software systems, has often been neglected. Nevertheless, dynamic analysis is recognized as yielding a more precise analysis in the face of polymorphism, a language feature widely used in object-oriented software systems. PCODA was first co-located with WCRE 2005, the 12th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, in Pittsburgh, and over the past three years has proved to be a very successful event, attracting a constant number of attendees and high quality submissions. We chose to adopt a unique format for the half day PCODA workshop. The authors do not present their own papers, each paper is assigned in advance to another participant who then presents a summary of the paper at the workshop. Experience has shown that the key advantage of adopting this format is that authors are given the opportunity to see an external interpretation of their work which in turn leads to interesting and lively discussions among the authors, the presenter and the audience. Thus it is not surprising that during the PCODA workshop an equal amount of time is devoted to discussion and presentation. Three highly successful PCODA workshops have led to this special issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice devoted to the topic of program comprehension through dynamic analysis. Authors of two papers from the PCODA 2007 workshop were invited to submit extended versions of their papers. An additional 10 papers