SAMEA: OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE ENVIRONMENT FOR ASSEMBLY PROGRAMS

Abstract

This paper presents a software maintenance environment for assembly programs, SAMEA. It presents an object-oriented database support for displaying, understanding, modifying and configuring assembly programs for software maintenance. Understanding of assembly programs is based on the theory of explicit representation of various structural and functionality elements of code and multiple relationships among them. Modification of program is based on an object-oriented incremental editor and a set of rules to check the correctness of instruction format. The characteristics of SAMEA are: integration of multiple tools, on-line information, ease of adoption of new tools, and finally, support of software maintenance activities such as program understanding, ripple effect analysis, and program redocumentation. The ripple effect of a contemplated change is the parts of the code that need to be reexamined for possible modification. Assembly code elements and relations among code elements are represented as objects in SAMEA which is built on top of an object-oriented database GemStone. SAMEA consists of 26K lines of C code and 4K lines of GemStone code. We have successfully populated 18K lines of BAL code in SAMEA.