A significant part of today’s program comprehension research addresses the long and complicated road a developer needs to travel to understand a given piece of code. But perhaps the best way to shorten this road, is by focusing on the eventual moment of enlightenment that marks the end of this road, when the developer actually understands the code and is about to make the required change.

Can we record this valuable moment of true understanding? Can the IDE know which methods, classes, execution traces, test cases, diagrams, or other artifacts contributed to this understanding? Are there light-weight mechanisms to ask the developer to record his understanding, for example via tagging, micro-blogging, or selection of a visualization that most accurately captures the understanding obtained? And is there a way to deal with non-monotonic understanding, in which some of the developer’s earlier insights turn out to be false?

At the moment, we don’t have answers to these questions. But, together with the audience, we will explore what results have been achieved so far, and which challenges need to be addressed to find the required answers. Furthermore, we will reflect on the simplest possible IDE that could offer this type of support for recording actual understanding, and investigate to what extent Web 2.0 based technologies can be used to realize such an IDE.