A Quick Tools Strategy for Program Analysis and Software Maintenance

Most software maintenance tasks are driven by specific customer requests for program corrections or enhancements. These often require detailed analyses of specific code segments. Monolithic tools may not be flexible enough to deal with such specific requests. This paper describes a strategy for quickly producing new special-purpose tools. The strategy combines existing tools including simple, off-the-shelf text processing tools; rule-based, language-specific analysis tools; and a commercial CASE tool. 1 Background 1.1 The maintenance context The greatest part of the software maintenance process is devoted to understanding the system being maintained. Fjeldstad and Hamlen report that 47% and 62% of the time spent on actual enhancement and correction tasks, respectively, are devoted to comprehension activities. These involve reading the documentation, scanning the source code, and understanding the changes to be made[1]. The implication is that if we want to improve maintenance, we sho..