Airi Salminen, Jukka Paakki & Jussi Koskinen
Incorporating
hypertext functionality into software maintenance environments
ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technologies
(ECHT’94): Workshop on Corporating Hypertext Functionality into Software
Systems. ACM Press. Conf. location: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Sept. 18‑23, 1994.
Hypertext integrates text with nonlinear navigation capabilities. This
makes it possible to read a textual representation flxibly in an arbitrary
order by following links between related nodes for text fragments. Therefore,
an access structure based on hypertext can be used as an aid both for program
understanding as well as for disciplined and focused maintenance, provided that
the nodes and links of the access structure are properly selected to support
the comprehension and maintenance activities. Viewing program text as hypertext
is especially interesting because program text fragments and their
relationships to each other have been extensively studied within programming
language research, and because there are lot of methods and tools for automatic
recognization of the fragments and their relationships. The hardest problems in
software maintenance are to understand the program and to localize the program
parts that should be modified for realizing the maintenance task at hand. These
problems are most serious when maintaining large legacy systems that have
evolved in various versions, often without any proper documentation. When the
size and complexity of the systems grow and original programmers are no more
available, and increased portion of human resources is bound to maintenance.
Because of the capital invested in the systems and the knowledge they contain,
it is hard to justify throwing them away although their maintenance may be
hard. Developing the maintenance environment is often much less costly than
replacement of the old software by a totally new. How can hypertext support features
be embedded in software maintenance systems? Instead of ad hoc solutions, the
incorporation of hypertext features should be based on new models to view and
read program texts. In the HyperSoft project, we have developed a language
independent method where a hypertextual access structure is automatically
extracted from a program to support comprehension and maintenance of existing
software. The
HyperSoft method was originally introduced in [Koskinen, Paakki & Salminen,
1994] and [Paakki, Salminen & Koskinen, 1994]. The architecture of the
HyperSoft system was introduced in [Salminen, Koskinen & Paakki, 1994]. ...
Updated: Sept. 27, 2004, Aug. 11, 2010 by Jussi Koskinen.