AN EXTENSIBLE APPROACH TO GENERATE FLOWCHARTS FROM SOURCE CODE

Source-code that a developer writes may not definitely make sense to another, the understandability of a source code depends on the proficiency in the language and the logical thinking pattern of the person who has developed the code and who tries to understand it. However, in distributed software development and in software maintenance there is a need to read and understand the source-code probably written by someone else after some time it has encoded. Flowcharts are used to depict the logical flow of processes and can be used as an effective tool in representing the control flow of software programs. This paper presents a novel approach to generate flowcharts from program snippets. It demonstrates that by using an intermediate abstract representation, independent of any programming language, the generation of flowcharts for programs written in any programming language can be achieved. The feasibility of the proposed approach was demonstrated by developing a porotype system of compilers to generate flowcharts for source-codes written in the PHP language.