An approach to software maintenance support using a syntactic source code analyser data base : this thesis is presented in a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Computer Science at Massey University

In this thesis, the development of a software maintenance tool called a syntactic source code analyser (SSCA) is summarised. An SSCA supports other maintenance tools which interact with source code by creating a data base of source information which has links to a formatted version of program source code. The particular SSCA presented handles programs written in a version of COBOL. Before developing a SSCA system, aspects of software maintenance need to be considered. Hence, the scope, definitions and problems of maintenance activities are briefly reviewed and maintenance support through environments, software metrics, and specific tools and techniques examined. A complete maintenance support environment for an application is found to overlap considerably with the application documentation system and shares some tools with development environments. Program source code is also identified as the fundamental documentation of an application and interaction with this source code is a requirement of many maintenance support tools

A documentation paradigm for an integrated software maintenance support environment

Recent advances in computer hardware have not been matched by comparable advances in computer software, inhibiting the production of reliable software at greater levels of productivity. Development of software is restricted by the so-called "maintenance backlog". Productivity in the maintenance sector has not kept pace with increasing annual labour costs, making the maintenance of software the major item in the budget, of organisations responsible for the development and maintenance of software. Gains in productivity can be anticipated by the exploitation of software-maintenance tools, within the framework of an Integrated .Software Maintenance Support Environment (ISMSE). for which a high-level design has been proposed in this thesis, offering comprehensive support for all phases of the software life-cycle, particularly the maintenance phase. A key factor in the reliable modification of software is the time taken to gain the prerequisite understanding, by a study of the system's documentation. This documentation degrades over a period of time, becoming unreliable, inhibiting maintenance of the software, which may be a large capital asset, ultimately, the software may become impossible to maintain, requiring replacement. Understanding gained during maintenance is wide-ranging and at various levels of abstraction, but is often NOT well-recorded, since no effective documentation system exists for recording the maintenance history of large software systems. The documentation paradigm in this thesis, used within the framework of an ISMSE, aims to provide a means of recording the knowledge gained during maintenance, facilitating easier future maintenance, and preserving the reliability of the documentation, so reducing the time required to gain an understanding of the software being maintained. This provides a powerful means of increasing productivity, while simultaneously preserving a valuable capital asset

A document-like software visualization method for effective cognition of c-based software systems

It is clear that maintenance is a crucial and very costly process in a software life cycle. Nowadays there are a lot of software systems particularly legacy systems that are always maintained from time to time as new requirements arise. One important source to understand a software system before it is being maintained is through the documentation, particularly system documentation. Unfortunately, not all software systems developed or maintained are accompanied with their reliable and updated documents. In this case, source codes will be the only reliable source for programmers. A number of studies have been carried out in order to assist cognition based on source codes. One way is through tool automation via reverse engineering technique in which source codes will be parsed and the information extracted will be visualized using certain visualization methods. Most software visualization methods use graph as the main element to represent extracted software artifacts. Nevertheless, current methods tend to produce more complicated graphs and do not grant an explicit, document-like re-documentation environment. Hence, this thesis proposes a document-like software visualization method called DocLike Modularized Graph (DMG). The method is realized in a prototype tool named DocLike Viewer that targets on C-based software systems. The main contribution of the DMG method is to provide an explicit structural re-document mechanism in the software visualization tool. Besides, the DMG method provides more level of information abstractions via less complex graph that include inter-module dependencies, inter-program dependencies, procedural abstraction and also parameter passing. The DMG method was empirically evaluated based on the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm and the findings depict that the method can improve productivity and quality in the aspect of cognition or program comprehension. A usability study was also conducted and DocLike Viewer had the most positive responses from the software practitioners

Extended Version of Elucidative Development for Model-Based Documentation and Language Specification

Documentation is an essential activity in software development, for source code as well as modelling artefacts. Typically, documentation is created and maintained manually which leads to inconsistencies as documented artefacts like source code or models evolve during development. Existing approaches like literate/elucidative programming or literate modelling address these problems by deriving documentation from software development artefacts or vice versa. However, these approaches restrict themselves to a certain kind of artefact and to a certain phase of the software development life-cycle. In this paper, we propose elucidative development as a generalisation of these approaches supporting heterogeneous kinds of artefacts as well as the analysis, design and implementation phases of the software development life-cycle. Elucidative development allows for linking source code and model artefacts into documentation and thus, maintains and updates their presentation semi-automatically. We present DEFT as an integrated development environment for elucidative development. We show, how DEFT can be applied to language specifications like the UML specification and help to avoid inconsistencies caused by maintenance and evolution of such a specification

Controlled Experiment for Assessing the Contribution of Ontology Based Software Redocumentation Approach to Support Program Understanding

Redocumentation is an approach that is used to recover knowledge from raw software artifacts by using alternative presentations. Several legacy systems have been developed based on event-driven programming which require redocumentation. However, these existing repository and query techniques emphasize only on lexical and syntactical based queries which come with limitations in providing the semantic relationship for program understanding. We are using ontology based approach that uses both ontology reasoning and querying techniques to generate software documentation from the knowledge repository. We present a controlled experiment for the empirical evaluation on the proposed ontology based approach and implemented in a tool called Ontology Based Software Redocumentation (OBSR). In this experiment, two existing tools namely Universal Report (UR) and Microsoft Visual Studio specifically for Visual Basic (VB) programming environment have been selected to be compared with the OBSR tool. The goal is to provide experimental evidence of the viability of our approach in the context of program understanding using HTML based semantic software documentation. The experiment shows that the software maintainers are able to understand and provide significant improvement in program understanding to accomplish the maintenance task easily. We describe in detail the experiment performed, discuss its results and reflect the lesson learned from the experiment

FINDS: A fault inferring nonlinear detection system programmers manual, version 3.0

Detailed software documentation of the digital computer program FINDS (Fault Inferring Nonlinear Detection System) Version 3.0 is provided. FINDS is a highly modular and extensible computer program designed to monitor and detect sensor failures, while at the same time providing reliable state estimates. In this version of the program the FINDS methodology is used to detect, isolate, and compensate for failures in simulated avionics sensors used by the Advanced Transport Operating Systems (ATOPS) Transport System Research Vehicle (TSRV) in a Microwave Landing System (MLS) environment. It is intended that this report serve as a programmers guide to aid in the maintenance, modification, and revision of the FINDS software

Development of a change management system

The complexity and interdependence of software on a computer system can create a situation where a solution to one problem causes failures in dependent software. In the computer industry, software problems arise and are often solved with 'quick and dirty' solutions. But in implementing these solutions, documentation about the solution or user notification of changes is often overlooked, and new problems are frequently introduced because of insufficient review or testing. These problems increase when numerous heterogeneous systems are involved. Because of this situation, a change management system plays an integral part in the maintenance of any multisystem computing environment. At the NASA Ames Advanced Computational Facility (ACF), the Online Change Management System (OCMS) was designed and developed to manage the changes being applied to its multivendor computing environment. This paper documents the research, design, and modifications that went into the development of this change management system (CMS)

Analysis of Legacy System in Software Application Development: A Comparative Survey

Software evolution is one of the challenging issues in today’s business environment. It is necessary for the organizations, which make use of Information, and Communication Technologies will have to align their business processes to compete with global business. The existing large software systems (“legacy” systems) have never been built to cope with the current business requirement for their poor coding, design structures, logic and documentation. Moreover, Legacy applications have various problems such as lack of up to-date documentation, skilled man power, resources of the Legacy applications, and high maintenance costs. Even though the Legacy system is obsolete, it contains detailed business rules and in continuous use, because it satisfies the users' needs and forms the backbone of the information flow of organization. One of the possible solutions is to refactor or modernize those systems into a new platform. It is necessary to analyse the existing legacy system for better understanding the business logic and its functionalities. This paper analyses various techniques proposed for understanding Legacy systems in existence