Jussi Koskinen,
Airi Salminen & Jukka Paakki
HyperSoft:
Viewing Program Text as Hypertext to Support Software Maintenance and
Comprehension
Doctoral Program Seminar on IS
Maintenance. Location: Swedish
School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, Finland. Aug. 22,
1994. 6 p.
Program comprehension is a prerequisite for various
programming tasks and takes in average about 50% of the time spent on software
maintenance. Software maintenance is most laborious while working with poorly
documented, large, unfamiliar, old, legacy systems. An increased portion of
human resources is bound to the maintenance when the original programmers are
no longer available for it. The specific maintenance task can be e.g. to locate
the origin of an invalid data value or to identify program statements that may
be affected by a modification of a specific program part. Software maintainer
typically browses back and forth in various nonlinear ways while trying to gain
comprehension over its structure, operation and purpose. Hypertext is text with
nonlinear browsing capabilities. It consists of text fragments called nodes and
links connecting these nodes. Hypertext is a promising way of organizing
information if it takes the form of numerous fragments, the fragments relate to
each other, and the user needs only a small fraction at a time. Hypertext can
provide an easy-to-use mechanism to identify program parts and relations
between them, to shift among program parts, and to represent program knowledge
to software maintainer. Different hypertext access structures can be used to
view the various aspects of the program.
Updated: Sept. 30, 2004
by Jussi Koskinen.