A Methodology to Support the Maintenance of Object -Oriented Systems Using Impact Analysis.

Object-Oriented (OO) systems are difficult to understand due to the complex nature of the relationships that object-orientation supports. Inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, information hiding, aggregation, and association combine to make maintenance of OO systems difficult. Due to the presence of these characteristics in OO systems, maintenance activities on OO systems often have unexpected or unseen effects on the system. These effects can ripple through system components, complicating maintenance and testing of the system. The ability to trace the effects of maintenance provides the maintainer with knowledge that assists in debugging and testing modified and affected components. In this research, we show that the architecture of an OO system provides an effective framework for determining the impact of system changes. We developed the Comparative Software Maintenance (CSM) methodology to support the maintenance of OO systems. Through this methodology, we model relationships and structures, analyze the models to determine components that change as a result of maintenance, and perform impact analysis to determine components that are candidates for re-testing as a result of maintenance activity. The methodology includes a new data model, called Extended Low-Level Software Architecture (ELLSA), that facilitates impact analysis. CSM locates potential side effects, ripple effects, and other effects of maintenance on class structures, methods, and objects. The comprehensive architecture model enables CSM to perform either predictive, pre-modification impact analysis or post-modification impact analysis. The improved impact analysis process found in the methodology determines impact of changes to the component level. We apply the results of impact analysis to determine component level testing requirements. CSM enhances program understanding through the use of ELLSA. It also provides assistance for capturing complex dependencies found in object-oriented code. The methodology is implemented in JFlex. The automation provided by JFlex makes the application of CSM feasible

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Twenty-third Annual Software Engineering Workshop (SEW) provided 20 presentations designed to further the goals of the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) of the NASA-GSFC. The presentations were selected on their creativity. The sessions which were held on 2-3 of December 1998, centered on the SEL, Experimentation, Inspections, Fault Prediction, Verification and Validation, and Embedded Systems and Safety-Critical Systems

Investigating maintenance processes in a framework-based environment

The empirical study described in this paper focuses on the effectiveness of maintenance processes in an environment in which a repository of potential sources of reuse exists, e.g. a context in which applications are built using an object-oriented framework. Such a repository might contain current and previous releases of the system under maintenance, as well as other applications that are built on a similar structure or contain similar functionality. This paper presents an observational study of 15 student projects in a framework-based environment. We used a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of the maintenance processes