An Agent-based Approach for the Maintenance of Database Applications

Database systems lie at the core of almost every modern software application. The interaction between the application source code and the underlying database schema results in a dependency relationship that affects the application ´s maintainability by raising a number of additional maintenance issues. To assess this effect and facilitate the maintenance process, a software engineering approach based on software agents is introduced. The distributed and cooperative nature of a software agent system provides the flexibility required to analyze modern multi-tier database applications such as web-based applications. A prototype system, which employs agent architecture in order to satisfy the requirements of the suggested approach, is presented.