Group support for the recording and sharing of maintenance rationale

The authors present a system which supports maintenance by allowing members of a maintenance team to easily construct and structure a shared pool of maintenance information. Through the provision of a range of unconstrained documentation facilities, documentation can be constructed incrementally by any member of the maintenance team. The general model adopted exploits hypertext technology to allow documentation to be integrated into the source code, by linking comments to the appropriate source component. Structuring facilities are provided which allow the source code and documentation to be seen at different levels of abstraction, in addition to a comment typing mechanism which allows different types of information to be explicitly represented