Towards a software maintenance support environment

The authors have designed a software maintenance support environment (SMSE) to assist in the maintenance of existing source code. They model software maintenance as a hybrid distributed problem-solving activity, in which the application-dependent knowledge is provided by the system, and common sense, programming expertise, and problem-solving knowledge are provided by the people on the project team. To define a set of requirements to be satisfied by a SMSE, a series of maintenance tasks were performed on an inventory control application consisting of about 68000 lines of Cobol program. These results of experiments, including lessons learned and requirements for an SMSE, are presented. A key role of the SMSE is to help the software engineer find all information relevant to a particular maintenance task without examining a lot of extraneous material. Access to the decision structure and the ability to assess the impact of decisions constitute the most important issue to be addressed by the SMSE. The experiments indicate that a high degree of reusability could be achieved for certain tasks using the information contained in the closure of that task