Maintenance and intermodular dependencies in Pascal environment

The authors outline the important role that actual and (mainly) potential intermodular dependencies play in the maintenance phase of a software product. They discuss the problem with reference to Pascal systems and they show how reverse engineering and static code analysis enable the identification of the actual and potential intermodular data flow and relationships. Some constraints are proposed to prevent an uncontrollable proliferation of data binding among modules and their reciprocal calls. To achieve the consistency of the programs with respect to the adopted constraints, the intermodular dependency knowledge, as produced by reverse engineering, is used to restructure both data and module declarations