Capturing design and maintenance decisions with MACS

MACS is a research and development project of the European ESPRIT II program, whose objective is the definition and implementation of a software maintenance assistance system. The basis premise of MACS is to do maintenance through understanding. MACS views the application from several perspectives in specific ´worlds´. One of them is the ´reasoning world´, which captures by means of a simple formalism, the problem-solution-decision formalism, the rationale underlying the design and maintenance process. MACS data integration is provided by a central base called the interconnection world. Moreover, MACS proposes to guide the maintainer in applying a strategy and in fully exploiting the possibilities of the MACS tools themselves by means of artificial-intelligence techniques and knowledge-based support