Software Systems Analysis— A Research Area Overview

Software systems analysis is a field in which analysts continually learn new techniques and approaches to properly capture, maintain, understand, and develop more efficient and effective software systems. We begin this research area overview by defining systems, systems analysis, and modeling. In subsequent sections, we focus on data and behavior representation of the system under study, prototyping, and formalism. Finally, we introduce some of the current work such as form-oriented analysis, fisheye views to support system analysis, and extreme programming and consider future work on software systems analysis such as extreme non-programming and new challenges for conceptual modeling.