A data model for software representation (abstract)

As software systems evolve, they grow larger and more complex. Thus, they become difficult to maintain. This is true, because making a change to a software system requires an understanding of how the part being changed fits into the system and of the potential ripple effect the change may have on the system. Understanding the software system is a time consuming activity. This is due to the fact that a software system is an abstract complex object. It may consist of many parts which are interrelated in many different ways forming a complex structure. Moreover, if the source code is the only reliable document that is available about a software system, understanding the software system will be more time consuming. The code of a software system show very little of their internal state and does not reveal the structure of the software system for the maintainer.

Two of the factors that help the understanding of the programs are: 1) the ability to see the information relevant to what we want to understand and 2) the use of a more natural form of representation of information.

In order to provide effective support for the software maintenance process, we believe that both factors described above should be incorporated in a software programming environment. In this paper, we present an environment which incorporate these factors and provides mechanisms for seeing and manipulating software in a much more powerful way than the current systems.