Supporting software maintenance by mining software update records | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Supporting software maintenance by mining software update records


Abstract:

This paper describes the application of inductive methods to data extracted from both source code and software maintenance records. We would like to extract relations tha...Show More

Abstract:

This paper describes the application of inductive methods to data extracted from both source code and software maintenance records. We would like to extract relations that indicate which files in, a legacy system, are relevant to each other in the context of program maintenance. We call these relations maintenance relevance relations. Such a relation could reveal existing complex interconnections among files in the system, which may in turn be useful in comprehending them. We discuss the methodology we employed to extract and evaluate the relations. We also point out some of the problems we encountered and our solutions for them. Finally, we present some of the results that we have obtained.
Date of Conference: 07-09 November 2001
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 06 August 2002
Print ISBN:0-7695-1189-9
Print ISSN: 1063-6773
Conference Location: Florence, Italy

1. Introduction

Legacy systems are old systems which still need to be maintained [32]. Despite the fact that these systems were developed many years ago, they are still essential in controlling some of the most important aspects of modern society. According to Ulrich, in 1990, 120 billion lines of code were in existence, most of which were considered to be legacy software systems at the time [34]. The Y2K problem brought the issue of software maintenance to the attention of a wider audience; some estimates of fixing this problem were in the trillions of dollars.

References

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