Software maintenance seen as a knowledge management issue

Creating and maintaining software systems is a knowledge intensive task. One needs to have a good understanding of the application domain, the problem to solve and all its requirements, the software process used, technical details of the programming language(s), the system’s architecture and how the diVerent parts Wt together, how the system interacts with its environment, etc. All this knowledge is diYcult and costly to gather. It is also diYcult to store and usually lives only in the mind of the software engineers who worked on a particular project. If this is a problem for development of new software, it is even more for maintenance, when one must rediscover lost information of an nature from legacy source code among a swarm of unrelated details. In this paper, we submit that this lack of knowledge is one of the prominent problems in software maintenance. To try to solve this problem, we adapted a knowledge extraction technique to the knowledge needs speciWc to software maintenan...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFSOF
• Authors: Nicolas Anquetil, Káthia Marçal de Oliveira, Kleiber D. de Sousa, Márcio Greyck Batista Dias
• Keywords: INFSOF 2007, Knowledge Intensive Task, Software, Software Systems