Software Maintenance Environment Research Articles

OVERVIEW OF THE TALISMAN VERSION 5 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING META-ENVIRONMENT

This report presents an overview of Talisman's version 5 functionality. Talisman is a computer aided software engineering meta-environment. It focuses strongly on model driven tools. It provides means to build software development and maintenance environments composed of a harmonious collection of representation languages and tools. The set of representation languages and tools may cover a very wide variety of development and maintenance activities. Talisman operates on a net of workstations, each containing an environment instance providing tools to support some of the activities of a specific software development and maintenance process. The collection of environment instances supports a large portion of the activities of a given development process. Talisman stores fine grained objects in a distributed repository. The base schema and meta-schema of this repository as well as the definition of user interfaces, representation languages and tools are kept in a definition base. Definition bases are derived from an environment base which contains all facts about supported representation languages and tools. The environment base is used by the environment builder to create and maintain representation languages and to adapt tools to the specific needs of a particular project. One of the basic aims of Talisman is to compose and maintain code and other artifacts from high level specifications relying heavily on model driven activities. The result of the development using Talisman is a hyper-document interrelating all artifacts that constitute the target system. The construction and maintenance of this hyper-document is achieved by successive transformations, modifications and verifications of a variety of models. To define and fine-tune these tools, Talisman uses an internal programming language, which specializes tools and activities, such as editors, code composers, representation transformers, representation verifiers and hyper-document navigation control.

B-12 ソフトウェア保守環境の調査と改善事例

B-12 ソフトウェア保守環境の調査と改善事例

A Matter of Balance: Specialization, Task Variety, and Individual Learning in a Software Maintenance Environment

Specialization at work has been recognized as a key driver of learning and productivity since the days of Adam Smith. More recently, researchers have noted that exposure to task variety can enhance learning. We examine how exposure to specialization and variety jointly drive employee productivity in a real-life setting. We analyze a data set covering 88 individuals who worked on 5,711 maintenance tasks in an offshore software support services operation. We find that, as expected, specialization enhances productivity. However, exposure to variety has a nonlinear influence on productivity; i.e., “too much variety” can impede learning. We also find that achieving a proper balance between specialization and exposure to a variety leads to the highest productivity. We capture this balance using an adaptation of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index from the economics literature. In addition, we examine how the productivity of individuals in a workgroup is affected by member entry and exit, with the latter specified in terms of the degree of specialized experience and the degree of variety experience lost from the workgroup when a member exits. Our analysis reveals that the degree of variety experience lost has a greater impact on productivity than the degree of specialized experience that is lost.

Revealing actual documentation usage in software maintenance through war stories

War stories are a form of qualitative data that capture informants’ specific accounts of surmounting great challenges. The rich contextual detail afforded by this approach warrants its inclusion in the methodological arsenal of empirical software engineering research. We ground this assertion in an exemplar field study that examined the use of documentation in software maintenance environments. Specific examples are unpacked to reveal a depth of insight that would not have been possible using standard interviews. This afforded a better understanding of the complex relationship between project personnel and documentation, including individuals’ roles as pointers, gatekeepers, or barriers to documentation.

AN ONTOLOGY FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE PROJECTS

Different proposals exist to represent the software maintenance process. However most of them are very informal or too focussed on a specific goal. We have developed a semi-formal ontology where the main concepts, according to the literature related to software maintenance, have been described. This ontology, besides representing static aspects, also represents dynamic issues related to the management of software maintenance projects. In order to develop an ontology a suitable methodology should also be followed. REFSENO was the methodology used in this work. The ontology that this work presents is not a preliminary idea but it has already been used in software maintenance environments, such as MANTIS, which is currently working successfully.

An Assessment for Software Maintenance Environment and its Improvement Examples

An Assessment for Software Maintenance Environment and its Improvement Examples

Supporting software development through declaratively codified programming patterns

In current-day software development, programmers often use programming patterns to clarify their intents and to increase the understandability of their programs. Unfortunately, most software development environments do not adequately support the declaration and use of such patterns. To explicitly codify these patterns, we adopt a declarative meta programming approach. In this approach, we reify the structure of a (object-oriented) program in terms of logic clauses. We declare programming patterns as logic rules on top of these clauses. By querying the logic system, these rules allow us to check, enforce and search for occurrences of certain patterns in the software. As such, the programming patterns become an active part of the software development and maintenance environment. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Intelligent Search Methods for Software Maintenance

This paper describes a study of what we call intelligent search techniques as implemented in a software maintenance environment. The techniques studied include abbreviation concatenation and abbreviation expansion. We also describe rating algorithms used to prioritize the query results. To evaluate our approach, we present a series of experiments in which we compare our algorithms' ratings of results to ratings provided by software engineers.

Software Configuration Management for a Reusable Software Library within a Software Maintenance Environment

Software Configuration Management and software reuse are now generally considered to be important technologies in software engineering. Both have been proposed for making a significant improvement in productivity and quality. However, these two technologies have been investigated separately. In order to make Software Configuration Management and reuse more effective, both approaches require to be introduced into a development or maintenance environment together. The authors have developed a process model for Maintenance with Reuse (MwR) to support Software Configuration Management for a reuse library within a maintenance environment. As software reuse and Software Configuration Management as well as software reuse and software maintenance have many similarities in their activities, and these areas can therefore be integrated within a software maintenance environment. An integrated approach to the common areas of these different activities will greatly contribute to the productivity and quality of software. This paper will address an integrated approach that can overcome some of the barriers that exist in software maintenance and reuse. A process model of an integrated approach has been created and validated using Process Weaver. In order for the reuse library to allow accesses from many potential reusers, the process model has been implemented on the WWW. The paper describes an integrated process model and its prototype to support change and version control for evolution of software components within both a reuse library and a legacy system.

AN OBJECT-BASED ENVIRONMENT (OPUSDEI) FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE

This paper discusses an object-based software development and maintenance environment, Opusdei, built and used for several years at Hitachi Software Engineering (HSK - Since 1994, University of Minnesota has been involved in the Opusdei project.) Industrial software is usually large, has many versions, undergoes frequent changes, and is developed concurrently by multiple programmers. Opusdei was designed to handle various problems inherent in such industrial environments. In Opusdei, all information needed for development is stored using an uniform representation in a central repository, and the various documentation and views of the software artifacts can be generated automatically using the tool repository. Opusdeis’ innovative capabilities are 1) uniform software artifacts representation 2) inter-relation and traceability maintenance among software artifacts 3) tools coordination and tool integration using tool composition scenarios 4) automatic documentation and versioning control. Tool coordination and composition has been discussed in the literature as a possible way to make software development environments more intelligent. Opusdei provides a uniform representation of software artifacts and tools which is an essential first step in addressing the issues of tool coordination and composition. Opusdei has been operational for several years and has been used in many large software development projects. The productivity gain reported for some of these projects, by using Opusdei ranged from 50–90%.

Development and application of composite complexity models and a relative complexity metric in a software maintenance environment

A great deal of effort is now being devoted to the study, analysis, prediction, and minimization of expected software maintenance cost, long before software is delivered to users or customers. It had been estimated that, on the average, the effort spent on software maintenance is as costly as the effort spent on all other software stages. Ways to alleviate software maintenance complexity and high costs should originate in software design. Two aspects of maintenance deserve attention: protocols for locating and rectifying defects and ensuring that no new defects are introduced in the development phase of the software process, and development of protocols for increasing the quality and reducing the costs associated with modification, enhancement, and upgrading of software. This article focuses on the second aspect and puts forward newly developed parsimonious models and a relative complexity metric for complexity measurement of software that were used to rank the modules in the system relative to each other. Significant success was achieved by use of the models and relative metric to identify maintenance-prone modules.

Developing an object-oriented software testing and maintenance environment

The object-oriented (OO) paradigm is rapidly gaining acceptance in the software industry. However, the powerful features of this new paradigm also introduce a new set of OO software testing and maintenance problems. The pioneering work in identifying these new problems includes [7, 10-12, 14, 16, 18]. The problems can be summarized as: 1) the understanding problem; 2) the complex interdependency problem; 3) the object state behavior testing problem; and 4) the tool support problem. Detailed discussions of these problems will be provided later. Our industrial experience confirms these discoveries.

How to merge program texts

Software usually exists in multiple versions. All these versions must evolve in parallel. We propose a program-merging system that helps programmers to manage the evolution of all versions, which is much needed in software development and maintenance environments. The system can either combine two programs or it can combine changes to a base program. The system consists of three stages: a syntax-based comparator, a synchronous printer and a merging editor. Based on the differences between the two programs identified by the syntax-based comparator, the synchronous printer combines the texts of two programs. Because there may be conflicts between the two programs, a merging editor provides the user with commands to resolve the conflicts. Another distinct feature of the merging system is the generator approach to producing syntactic program comparators for new programming languages.

A new approach to finding objects in programs

AbstractSoftware maintenance is difficult and costly because the maintainer must understand the existing relationships in the maintained code. The maintainer's job can be made considerably easier if the objects in the code (related groups of types, data, and procedures) are identified. In this paper, we discuss methods for identifying objects in programs, and present a new approach that relies on these key features. First, our internal program representation (IPR) lets us make a more precise identification of objects than previous methods allowed. Second, we introduce the idea of receiver‐based object identification. Third, we introduce the idea of two‐step object identification, which gives the user greater control in precisely identifying objects. Our object finding tool can be used with the other tools our IPR provides to create an integrated software maintenance environment.

Integrated Software Maintenance Environment for Safety-Related Systems

Integrated Software Maintenance Environment for Safety-Related Systems

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.

Three steps to views: extending the object-oriented paradigm

At the core of any sophisticated software development and maintenance environment is a large mass of complex data. The data (the central data of the environment) is composed of smaller sets of data that can be related in complicated and often subtle ways. The user or developer of the environment will be more effective if they are able to deal with conceptual slices, or views , of the large, complex structure. This paper presents an architectural building block for object-based software environments based on the views concept. The building block allows the construction of global abstractions that describe unified behavior of large sets of objects. The basis of the architecture relies on extending the object-oriented paradigm in three steps: (1) defining multiple interfaces in object classes; (2) controlling visibility of instance variables; and (3) allowing multiple copies of an instance variable to occur within an object instance. This paper focuses on the technical aspects of the views approach.

An integrated life-cycle model for software maintenance

In this paper, an integrated life-cycle model is presented for use in software maintenance environment. This model, which represents information about the development and maintenance of software systems, emphasizing relationships between different phases of the software life cycle, provides the basis for automated tools to assist maintenance personnel in making changes to existing software systems. This model is independent of particular specification, design and programming languages because it represents only certain “basic” semantic properties of software systems: control flow, data flow, and data structure. The software development processes by which one phase of the software life cycle is derived from another are represented by graph rewriting rules, which indicate how various components of a software system have been implemented. This approach permits analysis of the basic properties of a software system throughout the software life cycle. Examples are given to illustrate the integrated software life-cycle model during evolution.

An integrated life-cycle model for software maintenance

An integrated life-cycle model is presented for use in a software maintenance environment. The model represents information about the development and maintenance of software systems, emphasizing relationships between different phases of the software life cycle. It provides the basis for automated tools to assist maintenance personnel in making changes to existing software systems. The model is independent of particular specification, design, and programming languages because it represents only certain 'basic' semantic properties of software systems: control flow, data flow, and data structure. The software development processes by which one phase of the software life cycle is derived from another are represented by graph rewriting rules, which indicate how various components of a software system have been implemented. This approach permits analysis of the basic properties of a software system throughout the software life cycle. Examples are given to illustrate the integrated software life-cycle model during evolution. >

A communication-oriented approach to structuring the software maintenance environment

A communication-oriented approach to structuring the software maintenance environment