Maintaining a COTS Component-Based Solution Using Traditional Static Analysis Techniques

Abstract

Even as a process that integrates commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products into new homogeneous systems replaces “traditional” software development approaches, software maintenance problems persist. This work reports on the use of static analysis techniques on several medium-sized COTS solutions that have become difficult to maintain. We found that by exploiting semantic information, traditional techniques can be augmented to handle some of the unique maintenance issues of component-based software.