A KnowledgeBased System for Software Maintenance

2004

The software maintenance process involves a lot of effort and costs. In fact, this stage is considered the most expensive of the software development life-cycle. Moreover, during maintenance a considerable amount of information needs to be managed. This information often comes from diverse and distributed sources such as the products to be maintained, the people who work in this process, and the activities performed to update the software. However, very few software companies use knowledge management techniques to efficiently manage this information. Appropriate knowledge management would help software companies improve performance, control costs and decrease effort by taking advantage of previous solutions that could be reused to avoid repeating previous mistakes. This work presents a multiagent system designed to manage the information and knowledge generated during the software maintenance process; using web technologies to support this management. The system has different types of agents, each devoted to a particular type of information. Agents use different reasoning techniques to generate new knowledge from previous information and to learn from their own experience. Thereby the agents become experts in the type of knowledge they are responsible for. Additionally, agents communicate with each other to share information and knowledge.

2007

Software maintenance tasks are the most expensive activities on legacy systems life cycle, and system understanding is the most important factor of this cost. This paper presents the LIFT: Legacy InFormation retrieval Tool, a tool for knowledge retrieval from legacy code, which requirements were defined from studies about current approaches and tools, in addition to a new requirement based on automatic suggestions to the user.

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 2001

In this paper we present MANTOOL, an automatic tool for managing the software maintenance process according to MANTEMA, a rigorous methodology for maintenance. After explaining briefly the MANTEMA structure, the article explains how MANTOOL allows users to manage modification requests following the different stages of the methodology, showing it with some examples. The data saved in MANTOOL can be used to extract different kinds of reports and to do estimations of future maintenance interventions. The paper also includes some experience reports about the construction and application of MANTEMA and MANTOOL, and some reflections on the benefits of its use.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2014

In maintenance of object-oriented software, one of the most important concepts is inheritance, which organizes classes into a hierarchy. The presence of the inheritance increases the number of potential dependencies within a program. Moreover, the comprehension of an existing software system can consume half or more of the maintenance time. The relationships among packages, classes, access modifiers, inherited classes and methods can affect on modification of the software. So, the proposed system uses the concept-based approach, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) in order to comprehend the overall system (software project), and graphically visualize the modifier-based dependencies in terms of packages, classes, methods and inheritance relationship. The proposed system focuses on the problem how to provide an understanding of the software. Static java source code is analyzed in this system.

1996

The extreme difficulty of software maintenance means that specialised support tools are required. There are however potential disadvantages of inaccessibility and non-standard presentations. The presentation problem can be solved by interfacing intelligent maintenance tools to standard presentation environments, such as WWW hypertext browsers. This then poses the question: why not also use WWW technology to make intelligent maintenance tools more accessible?

Expert Systems with Applications, 1992

AImtmct--One of the major obstacles to the routine exploitation of knowledge-based and expert systems, is the difficulty of validating the knowledge base, and of maimaining it in a state which reflects current knowledge. This is of particular importance for systems based on law or regulations, where it is vital that the knowledge base be a true reflection of the legal position, and where there is a constant stream of changes to the correct legal position. Maintenance Assistance for Knowledge Engineers (MAKE) is a project designed to explore these issues, and to build a set of tools which will support the validation and maintenance of knowledge bases deriving fi'om regulations. These tools include facilities to examine the structural features of the knowledge base, so as to guard against redundancy, nonprovability and comrudiction; facilities to identify parts of the knowledge base jeopardised by changes in the domain, or in the understanding of the domain; and facilities to perform a variety of "house keeping" tasks. The paperj~rstly analyses the different types of change that may be required to maintain the knowledge base, and then proceeds to describe the set of tools developed in the MAKE project to accommodate these changes.

2003

The purpose of this book is to explore the key issues underpinning software change and to discuss how these issues impact on the implementation of changes to software systems. The motivation for the book came from the need for texts dealing directly with challenges that software engineers face when modifying complex software systems. The extent of this challenge can be seen in the cost of modifying software. This cost can reach 70% of the total life-cycle cost [4, 36, 176]. Software maintenance is recognised as a key area in software engineering [9, 163]. Despite this, many mainstream software engineering courses are biased towards the development of new software systems at the expense of issues surrounding changes to these systems after they become operational [70].

2002

This article is an overview of software maintance, its relevance, the problems, and the available solutions. The focus is on the structure of the maintenance activity, including general models of the maintenance process, existing standards, and management practices and tools. The article also includes a discussion of related areas that support software maintenance, and particularly reverse engineering, reengineering, and legacy systems.

Proceedings Eighth Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

Accelerating the learning curve of software maintainers working on systems with which they have little familiarity motivated this study. A working hypothesis was that automated methods are needed to provide a fast, rough grasp of a system, to enable practitioners not familiar with it, to commence maintenance with a level of confidence as if they had this familiarity. Expert maintainers were interviewed regarding their strategies and information needs to test this hypothesis. The overriding message is their need for a "starting point" when analysing code. They also need standardised, reliable and communicable information about a system as an equivalent to knowledge available only to developers or experienced maintainers. These needs are addressed by the proposed "roughcut" approach to program comprehension. Work underway assesses the suitability of using data mining techniques on data derived from source code to provide high level models of a system and module interrelationships.