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Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Foundations of Cognitive Support: Toward Abstract Patterns of Usefulness
DSV-IS '02 Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Interactive Systems. Design, Specification, and Verification
Theory adapters as discipline coordinators
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Interdisciplinary software engineering research
On generating cognitive patterns of software comprehension
CASCON '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
Through a mirror darkly: How programmers understand legacy code
Information-Knowledge-Systems Management
The smart internet: transforming the web for the user
CASCON '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research
The smart internet
The smart internet
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Past research on software comprehension tools has produced a wealth of lessons in building good tools. However our explanations of these tools tends to be weakly grounded in existing theories of cognition and human-computer interaction. As a result, the interesting rationales underlying their design are poorly articulated, leaving the lessons primarily implicit. This paper describes a way of using existing program comprehension theories to rationalize tool designs. To illustrate the technique, key design rationales underlying a prominent reverse engineering tool (Reflexion Model Tool) are reconstructed. The reconstruction shows that theories of cognitive support can be applied to existing cognitive models of developer behaviour. The method for constructing the rationales is described, and implications are drawn for codifying existing design knowledge, evaluating tools, and improving design reasoning.