Despite the widespread adoption and success of software inspection, many software products continue to be released with large numbers of flaws. This can partly be attributed to the inherent complexity of software systems. The complexity of the software thwarts manual attempts to comprehend it.


We believe that tools that allow reasoning about the deep structure of the code at a high level of detail will be extremely useful for doing software inspections. In this paper we describe how our own system - CodeSurfer - provides access to and queries on the system-dependence graph representation of a program for the purposes of helping with software inspections.