MACS: maintenance assistance capability for software-a KADME

MACS´s goal is to offer a customizable software maintenance assistance system. Its main concern is to help the maintainer in gaining a deep understanding of existing or in-progress applications, of the factual data (change management world and abstraction recovery world), the design decisions rationale (reasoning world), and the mapping of domain to programming components (interconnection world). This broad reverse-engineering approach is enhanced by impact analysis techniques to better perceive the interaction between components. The MACS supervisor proposes a set of maintenance process models to guide the maintainer through the MACS worlds. Knowledge base and expert system techniques are used in conjunction with software engineering techniques, which makes MACS a KADME (knowledge assistance for development and maintenance environment)