Pattern Matching for Design Concept Localization

A legacy system is an operational, large-scale software system that is maintained beyond its first generation of programmers. It typically represents a massive economic investment and is critical to the mission of the organization it serves. As such systems age, they become increasingly complex and brittle, and hence harder to maintain. They also become even more critical to the survival of their organization because the business rules encoded within the system are seldom documented elsewhere. Our research is concerned with developing a suite of tools to aid the maintainers of legacy systems in recovering the knowledge embodied within the system. The activities, known collectively as “program understanding”, are essential preludes for several key processes, including maintenance and design recovery for reengineering. In this paper we present three pattern-matching techniques: source code metrics, a dynamic programming algorithm for finding the best alignment between two code fra...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Kostas Kontogiannis, Renato de Mori, Morris Bernstein, M. Galler, Ettore Merlo
• Keywords: Legacy Systems, Massive Economic Investment, Software Engineering, Source Code, WCRE 1995