Comprehension support during knowledge transitions: learning from field

Knowledge Transition (KT) of legacy applications is a critical activity, often determining the quality of maintenance in the early stages of a maintenance life-cycle. We developed an integrated reverse engineering tool-suite that bootstraps the KT process by providing knowledge recipients insights to application structure, quality and functionality. The tool-suite is based on an in-depth study with KT practitioners and a comparative study of existing tools. We evaluated the benefits of the tool-suite during KT in real-life projects. In this talk, we report our learning from the study and evaluation phases.