On the use of cluster analysis for assisting maintenance of large software systems

With the ever-increasing size and complexity of software systems, their maintenance becomes a more and more difficult issue. Therefore, classical managerial solutions cannot be applied for maintaining very large software systems. The maintenance task must be assisted by automated techniques. Most ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in[1988] Proceedings. The Third Israel Conference on Computer Systems and Software Engineering pp. 178 - 186
Main Author Maarek, Y.S.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 1988
Subjects
Application software
Data mining
Documentation
Information retrieval
Natural languages
Performance analysis
Programming profession
Software libraries
Software maintenance
Software systems
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Summary:With the ever-increasing size and complexity of software systems, their maintenance becomes a more and more difficult issue. Therefore, classical managerial solutions cannot be applied for maintaining very large software systems. The maintenance task must be assisted by automated techniques. Most existing tools can assist maintenance tasks only by requiring a lot of human-given information at the development stage. In contrast, the author claims that a lot of useful information can be directly retrieved from the existing code (and in the best cases, the natural language documentation) and that maintenance tools should be based on such automatically extracted information. The author performs a structural analysis of large software systems via adequate clustering techniques. This analysis allows retrieving useful information from the system that directs the considered maintenance task. Two tools that embody this approach in the domains of change management and reusability are also described.< >
ISBN:0818608846
9780818608841
DOI:10.1109/ICCSSE.1988.72260