A blackboard model to design integrated intelligent software maintenance environment

Intelligent software systems have been proposed to address the problem of integration in the next generation of software engineering environments (SEEs). This paper addresses the organizational principles of an integrated architecture, the Software Maintenance Expert System (SMES), using a model drawn from artificial intelligence techniques. In the software maintenance process, the interdependence of abstraction recovery tools and application domain components plays a key role in the representation of the user´s mental model of the system under maintenance. To support the reverse engineering process and hence the change process, the integration between procedural and declarative maintenance knowledge is needed. The authors advocate the use of a blackboard model to address this issue