SOFTM: a software maintenance expert system in Prolog

A description is given of a knowledge-based system called SOFTM, serving the following purposes: (1) assisting a software programmer or analyst in his application code maintenance tasks, (2) generating and updating automatically software correction documentation, (3) helping the end user register, and possibly interpret, observed errors on the successive application code versions. SOFTM is written in Prolog II and is largely applicable to application codes written in different programming languages, provides code descriptors can be retrieved. SOFTM does not address any of the syntactic, input-output, or procedural errors normally detected by the syntactic analyzer, compiler, or by the operating system environment. SOFTM relies on a unique ATN network-based code description, on diagnostic inference procedure based on context-based pattern classification, on maintenance log report generators, and on interfacing capabilities of Prolog II to a variety of other languages