Comprehending reality - practical barriers to industrial adoption of software maintenance automation

Author

Cordy, James R.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput., Queen´´s Univ., Kingston, Ont., Canada

fYear

2003

fDate

10-11 May 2003

Firstpage

196

Lastpage

205

Abstract

Recent years have seen many significant advances in program comprehension and software maintenance automation technology. In spite of the enormous potential savings in software maintenance costs, for the most part adoption of these ideas in industry remains at the experimental prototype stage. In this paper the author explores some of the practical reasons for industrial resistance to adoption of software maintenance automation. Based on the experience of six years of software maintenance automation services to the financial industry involving more than 4.5 Gloc of code at Legasys Corporation, the author discusses some of the social, technical and business realities that lie at the root of this resistance, outlines various Legasys attempts overcome these barriers, and suggests some approaches to software maintenance automation that may lead to higher levels of industrial acceptance in the future.

Keywords

automatic programming; computer aided software engineering; financial data processing; reverse engineering; social aspects of automation; software maintenance; Legasys Corporation; financial industry; industrial acceptance; program comprehension; social realities; software maintenance automation; Application software; Automation; Banking; Computer industry; Conferences; Councils; Data processing; Layout; Software maintenance; Software systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Program Comprehension, 2003. 11th IEEE International Workshop on

ISSN

1092-8138

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1883-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WPC.2003.1199203

Filename

1199203