Improving Software Maintenance through Advanced Trace Analysis and Abstraction Techniques

我们的社会在许多重要的活动中很大程度上依赖于软件系统，包括金融、卫生、教育、电信、航空航天等等。这些软件系统需要定期维护和升级，以满足不断增长的用户需求和不断变化的技术。然而，维护这样的系统是一项具有挑战性且成本高昂的活动。事实上，专家们一致认为这是软件工程中最困难的任务之一。问题是，软件工程师必须了解软件系统的不同方面，然后才能进行更改，以保持可靠性和其他系统属性。在理想的环境中，设计决策将基于保存在最新文档中的信息。然而，由于各种原因，在许多组织中发现维护足够好的文档是不切实际的。

Our society depends greatly on software systems in many of its critical activities including finance, health, education, telecommunications, aerospace, and many more. These software systems need to be regularly maintained and upgraded to meet the ever increasing user needs and the constant changes in technology. However, maintaining such systems is a challenging and costly activity. In fact, experts agree that this is one of the most difficult tasks in software engineering. The problem is that software engineers must understand different aspects of a software system before they can make changes that preserve reliability and other system attributes. In an ideal environment, design decisions would be based on information kept in up-to-date documentation. However, for a variety of reasons, maintaining sufficiently good documentation has been found to be impractical in many organizations. In this research program, my students and I will investigate new and advanced approaches that can help software engineers understand the complex behaviour of software systems. We will particularly focus on tracing and monitoring techniques. The ultimate objective is to improve the productivity of software engineers as they solve maintenance problems. The outcomes of this research program should have a real impact on the Canadian software industry. Canadian companies and government agencies can focus on delivering new products and enhanced services that add value to the customers instead of spending energy and money on understanding and fixing existing systems. The program will also contribute to the training of highly qualified personnel in an area that has gained an increased attention both nationally and internationally.