CAREER: Toward a Design Environment for Recovering and Maintaining the Structure of Software Systems

社会比以往任何时候都更加依赖正确运行的软件系统。修改软件系统以确保其可靠性带来了重大的技术和经济挑战。软件工程师面临的困难包括缺少或不正确的文档，结构不佳的代码，以及理解传递下来的系统所需的努力。要维护软件，必须恢复、理解、更正和维护软件的设计级结构。这项研究的目标是开发技术和实现工具来简化软件维护。拟议的工具支持三项活动：第一，设计恢复，以从系统中提取结构信息；第二，设计可视化，以便于查看恢复的软件结构；第三，设计维护，以确定设计的质量，识别问题区域，衡量软件修改的影响，等等。我们的设计维护方法的核心是用于指定软件结构上的约束的形式主义。根据这些规范，设计维护工具被自动生成以检测对这些约束的违反。目前，由于没有这样的工具，设计者很难保持经过持续修改的系统的结构完整性。这项工作的结果将使软件从业者受益，并激励教育工作者将软件维护技术和工具整合到他们的课程中。

9733569 More than ever, society relies on software systems that operate correctly. Modifying software systems to insure their reliability poses major technical and economic challenges. The difficulties that face software engineers include absent or incorrect documentation, poorly structured code, and the effort required to understand handed-down systems. To maintain software, one must recover, understand, correct, and maintain the design-level structure of the software. The goal of this research is to develop techniques and implement tools to simplify software maintenance. The proposed tools support three activities: first, design recovery to extract structural information from systems; second, design visualization to facilitate the viewing of recovered software structures; third, design maintenance to determine the quality of designs, identify problematic areas, measure the impact of software modifications, and so on. Central to our design maintenance approach is a formalism for specifying constraints on software structures. From these specifications, the design maintenance tools are automatically generated to detect violations of such constraints. Currently, in the absense of such tools, designers have difficulty preserving the structural integrity of systems that undergo continuous modification. The outcome of this work should benefit software practitioners and inspire educators to integrate software maintenance techniques and tools into their curricula.***