An analysis of incremental assistant capabilities of a software evolution expert system

Abstract

The authors propose to do maintenance with the software system model (SSM) that provides the maintainer with a number of alternative views of the code. To make an understandable presentation of more information than the code contains, the expert system must offer information system capabilities, such as semantic retrieval and intelligent indexing. An analysis of the capabilities and the degrees of assistance of a software evolution expert system (SEES) is given in an incremental framework. The authors address SEES reasoning directed by knowledge in models of views, analyze SEES capabilities, and point out different degrees of assistance and models of views. Some tradeoffs in SEES development are discussed and evaluated. The analysis has led to five functional architectures. Each architecture assumes that one has one or more view models available. The authors describe the results of the first SEES prototype.<>