Software Maintenance Activities Research Articles

A formal approach to perfective software maintenance: Integration using a basis

We investigate how a formalism, common to many areas of applied mathematics and engineering, known as a basis can be applied to perfective maintenance and integration in software engineering, using an object-oriented approach. It is concluded that this formalism serves as a mathematical model for perfective software maintenance and integration activities. Theorems and properties about the model are reported as guides to software maintenance. The model and formal maintenance techniques have been applied to a software system in the management information systems area to demonstrate this approach to perfective maintenance and to assist in validating the model.

A formal approach to perfective software maintenance: System integration using a basis of formal object-oriented components

We investigate how a formalism known as a basis and common to many areas of applied mathematics and engineering can be applied to perfective maintenance and the integration of application systems in software engineering, using an object-oriented approach. It is concluded that this formalism serves as a mathematical model for perfective software maintenance and software systems integration activities under object-oriented development. Theorems and properties about the model are reported as guides to software maintenance. The model and formal maintenance techniques have been applied to a software system in the management information systems area to demonstrate this approach to perfective maintenance and to assist in validating the model.

SAMEA: OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE ENVIRONMENT FOR ASSEMBLY PROGRAMS

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.

Program concept recognition and transformation

The automated recognition of abstract high-level conceptual information or concepts, which can greatly aid the understanding of programs and therefore support many software maintenance and reengineering activities, is considered. An approach to automated concept recognition and its application to maintenance-related program transformations are described. A unique characteristic of this approach is that transformations of code can be expressed as transformations of abstract concepts. This significantly elevates the level of transformation specifications.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Techniques for application software maintenance

Software maintenance accounts for up to 90% of software lifecycle effort. Software maintenance activities are re-classified into five categories. Reasons for high maintenance costs are described for each maintenance type. Several techniques to reduce current and future maintenance are described and compared. Current maintenance techniques for program browsing, software documentation, and program analysis as well as commercially available computer-aided software maintenance tools are described. Techniques to improve software maintainability, such as software re-structuring, re-engineering, reverse engineering, and defensive programming approach, and techniques to increase the maintenance productivity of future programs are described. Selection criteria in choosing these maintenance techniques and some recommendations for maintenance organization are discussed.

A model for assembly program maintenance

AbstractThis paper presents a model for understanding assembly programs for software maintenance. It is based on the theory that explicit representation of various structural and functional elements of code and multiple relationships among them will aid program understanding and thus software maintenance. We present a parsing technique to extract all the required elements from assembly code to populate the model. The model is a reverse engineering technique. We use the term reverse engineering in its broad sense to include specification as well as design recovery. Most features of this model have been implemented in a tool named “RETA” for Reverse Engineering Tool for Assembly programs.The model is useful for software maintenance activities such as program understanding, ripple effect analysis, and program re‐documentation. The ripple effect of a contemplated change is the parts of code that depend on the variable or a piece of code to be changed. Once the change is made, those parts need to be re‐examined for possible modification. The model generates a functional menu for a given application. The menu describes the functionality of each routine. It is a hierarchical presentation of major program routines, the sub‐routines supporting each major routine and so on. A routine at any level of detail consists of one or more paths through the code. Paths are presented as control flow sequences between code blocks. Code blocks, and hence functionalities, use and modify data.The maintainer locates the routine to be modified at the lowest level of detail within the functional menu. This automatically slices out the set of paths, and hence the set of code blocks, that have a role in the functionality to be changed. The code blocks in the slice determine the data that are used and modified within the routine to be changed. Path analysis and associated data‐used and data‐modified information are used to determine which code blocks are to be changed and which data roles are to be modified. The same set of relations are applied in reverse to identify the ripple effect.

Foundations for the Arcadia environment architecture

Early software environments have supported a narrow range of activities ( programming environments) or else been restricted to a single “hard-wired” software development process. The Arcadia research project is investigating the construction of software environments that are tightly integrated, yet flexible and extensible enough to support experimentation with alternative software processes and tools. This has led us to view an environment as being composed of two distinct, cooperating parts. One is the variant part, consisting of process programs and the tools and objects used and defined by those programs. The other is the fixed part, or infrastructure , supporting creation, execution, and change to the constituents of the variant part. The major components of the infrastructure are a process programming language and interpreter, object management system, and user interface management system. Process programming facilitates precise definition and automated support of software development and maintenance activities. The object management system provides typing, relationships, persistence, distribution and concurrency control capabilities. The user interface management system mediates communication between human users and executing processes, providing pleasant and uniform access to all facilities of the environment. Research in each of these areas and the interaction among them is described.

Foundations for the Arcadia environment architecture

Early software environments have supported a narrow range of activities ( programming environments) or else been restricted to a single “hard-wired” software development process. The Arcadia research project is investigating the construction of software environments that are tightly integrated, yet flexible and extensible enough to support experimentation with alternative software processes and tools. This has led us to view an environment as being composed of two distinct, cooperating parts. One is the variant part, consisting of process programs and the tools and objects used and defined by those programs. The other is the fixed part, or infrastructure , supporting creation, execution, and change to the constituents of the variant part. The major components of the infrastructure are a process programming language and interpreter, object management system, and user interface management system. Process programming facilitates precise definition and automated support of software development and maintenance activities. The object management system provides typing, relationships, persistence, distribution and concurrency control capabilities. The user interface management system mediates communication between human users and executing processes, providing pleasant and uniform access to all facilities of the environment. Research in each of these areas and the interaction among them is described.

Design Stability Measures for Software Maintenance

The high cost of software during its life cycle can be attributer largely to software maintenance activities, and a major portion of these activities is to deal with the modifications of the software. In this paper, design stability measures which indicate the potential ripple effect characteristics due to modifications of the program at the design level are presented. These measures can be generated at any point in the design phase of the software life cycle which enables early maintainability feedback to the software developers. The validation of these measures and future research efforts involving the development of a user-oriented maintainability measure, which incorporates the design stability measures as well as other design measures, are discussed.