Dependency Directed Reasoning and Learning in Systems Maintenance Support
29 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2008
Date Written: March 1987
Abstract
The maintenance of large information systems involves continuousmodifications in response to evolving business conditions or changing userrequirements. Based on evidence from a case study, we show that thesystems maintenance activity would benefit greatly if the processknowledge reflecting the teleology of a design could be captured and usedin order to reason about the consequences of changing conditions orrequirements. We describe a formalism called REMAP (REpresentationand MAintenance of Process knowledge) that accumulates design processknowledge to manage systems evolution. To accomplish this, REMAPacquires and maintains dependencies among the design decisions madeduring a prototyping process, and is able to learn general domain-specificdesign rules on which such dependencies are based. This knowledge cannot only be applied to prototype refinement and systems maintenance,but can also support the re-use of existing design or software fragments toconstruct similar ones using analogical reasoning techniques.
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