PercSoft: A Novel Approach to Software Maintenance and Enhancement

When we execute a program, we cannot know its behavior inside the program. Even by using a debugger, we cannot know the correspondence between a part of its output and a part of the program, either. The program being executed is a kind of black box to the people who are using it. This paper presents the concept of perceptible software that changes a program being executed from a black box to a white box, where we can directly modify the program source code that corresponds to the part of the execution result we choose. The paper also describes an example of its implementation PercSoft.