THE EXTENSIBLE DEPENDENCY ANALYSIS TOOL SET: A KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR UNDERSTANDING INDUSTRIAL SOFTWARE
Norman Wilde, Allen Chapman, Raymond Richardson · International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 1994
Industrial software systems are generally both large and complex. They tend to contain multiple languages and diverse kinds of structure that maintainers need to understand to do their jobs effectively. The Extensible Dependency Analysis Tool Set (EDATS) has been designed to provide support for understanding these kinds of systems. The EDATS concept emerged from discussions with industrial affiliates of the Software Engineering Research Center. It is built around a very flexible underlying structure in which software is represented as a generalized dependency graph; queries “by example” request chains of links from that graph. Information from diverse sources can be incorporated and the tool set can be easily extended to handle special relationships found in a particular system. A small case study is presented to illustrate the kinds of questions that maintainers tend to ask in understanding an unfamiliar system and to show how EDATS can help in answering such questions.