Problems of maintenance of JSP structures
Colin Davies · Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice · 1990
Abstract A JSP oriented program design environment has been produced at UMIST (known as MAJIC), which computerizes the whole of the JSP methodology. This computerization of JSP has shown some shortcomings of the method with regard to the maintenance of the finished programs. The method imposes restrictions on the modification of program and data structures which reduces the effectiveness of using the method to maintain existing structures. This paper investigates some of those restrictions in the light of the work done to produce the MAJIC system. The restrictions are centred on the JSP mechanism for data structure correspondences, which are crucial to the use of JSP. Rules are proposed by which controlled modifications may be made to Jackson structures without, as is otherwise the case, of the need to reprocess large parts of the method. The rules were made in order to make a tool based on JSP more flexible, but they may equally be applied to maintenance of structures produced manually.