DEPENDENCY DIRECTED REASONING AND LEARNING IN SYSTEMS MAINTENANCE SUPPORT

Abstract

The maintenance of large information systems involves continuous modifications in response to evolving business conditions or changing user requirements. Based on evidence from a case study, we show that the systems maintenance activity would benefit greatly if the process knowledge reflecting the teleology of a design could be captured and used in order to reason about the consequences of changing conditions or requirements. We describe a formalism called REMAP (REpresentation and MAintenance of Process knowledge) that accumulates design process knowledge to manage systems evolution. To accomplish this, REMAP acquires and maintains dependencies among the design decisions made during a prototyping process, and is able to learn general domain-specific design rules on which such dependencies are based. This knowledge can not only be applied to prototype refinement and systems maintenance, but can also support the re-use of existing design or software fragments to construct similar ones using analogical reasoning techniques.