The DOI matches its Crossref record; 18 of the 18 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Program understanding: Challenge for the 1990s
Abstract
In the Program Understanding Project at IBM's Research Division, work began in late 1986 on tools which could help programmers in two key areas: static analysis (reading the code) and dynamic analysis (running the code). The work is reported in the companion papers by Cleveland and by Pazel in this issue. The history and background which motivated and which led to the start of this research on tools to assist programmers in understanding existing program code is reported here.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Software engineering: A practitioner's approach
(1983) · Advances in Engineering Software (1978) · doi:10.1016/0141-1195(83)90118-3 · Cited by 8,234
The psychology of computer programming
(1999) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.36-4535 · Cited by 962
A model of large program development
Belady, L. A., & Lehman, M. M. (1976) · IBM Systems Journal · doi:10.1147/sj.153.0225 · Cited by 476
Swanson, E. B. (1976) · doi:10.5555/800253.807723 · Cited by 444
When novices surpass experts: The difficulty of a task may increase with expertise.
Adelson, B. (1984) · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · doi:10.1037//0278-7393.10.3.483 · Cited by 401
Syntactic/semantic interactions in programmer behavior: A model and experimental results
Shneiderman, B., & Mayer, R. (1979) · International Journal of Computer & Information Sciences · doi:10.1007/bf00977789 · Cited by 382
Halasz, F. G., Moran, T. P., & Trigg, R. H. (1986) · ACM SIGCHI Bulletin · doi:10.1145/1165387.30859 · Cited by 340
Delocalized Plans and Program Comprehension
Letovsky, S., & Soloway, E. (1986) · IEEE Software · doi:10.1109/ms.1986.233414 · Cited by 245
Katz, S. M., & Manna, Z. (1976) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/360032.360048 · Cited by 137
Understanding and debugging programs
Lukey, F. J. (1980) · International Journal of Man-Machine Studies · doi:10.1016/s0020-7373(80)80017-4 · Cited by 94
Cited by
Using metrics to evaluate software system maintainability
Coleman, D., Ash, D., Lowther, B., & Oman, P. (1994) · Computer · doi:10.1109/2.303623 · Cited by 431
A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis
Cornelissen, B., Zaidman, A., van Deursen, A., Moonen, L., & Koschke, R. (2009) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2009.28 · Cited by 420
Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals
Xia, X., Bao, L., Lo, D., Xing, Z., Hassan, A. E., & Li, S. (2018) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2017.2734091 · Cited by 326
Portfolio: finding relevant functions and their usage
McMillan, C., Grechanik, M., Poshyvanyk, D., Xie, Q., & Fu, C. (2011) · Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/1985793.1985809 · Cited by 313
Supporting program comprehension with source code summarization
Haiduc, S., Aponte, J., & Marcus, A. (2010) · Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2 · doi:10.1145/1810295.1810335 · Cited by 291
Metadata
- Authors
- Corbi, T. A.
- Venue
- IBM Systems Journal
- Publisher
- IBM
- Published
- 1989
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 294-306
- ISSN
- 0018-8670 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2001033929
- Cited by
- 388
- References
- 18
- FWCI
- 37.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Program understanding: Challenge for the 1990s. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1147/sj.282.0294
- The paper
- Corbi, T. A. (1989). Program understanding: Challenge for the 1990s. IBM Systems Journal. https://doi.org/10.1147/sj.282.0294
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.