A quick tools strategy for program analysis and software maintenance

A strategy for quickly producing special-purpose tools is described. The strategy combines existing tools including simple off-the-shelf text processing tools; rule-based, language-specific analysis tool; and a commercial CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tool. The strategy has been successfully used in the context of the maintenance and reverse engineering of a large, real-time software system used for telephony. The approach is illustrated by examples that include the generation of cross reference information, calling trees, run-time stack analysis, and code restructuring