Capturing design and maintenance decisions with MACS

Abstract

MACS is a research and development project of the European ESPRIT II program, whose objective is the definition and implementation of a software maintenance assistance system. The basis premise of MACS is to do maintenance through understanding. MACS views the application from several perspectives in specific 'worlds'. One of them is the 'reasoning world', which captures by means of a simple formalism, the problem-solution-decision formalism, the rationale underlying the design and maintenance process. MACS data integration is provided by a central base called the interconnection world. Moreover, MACS proposes to guide the maintainer in applying a strategy and in fully exploiting the possibilities of the MACS tools themselves by means of artificial-intelligence techniques and knowledge-based support.<>