Maintenance and Reengineering

Software Maintenance – Software supportability – Reengineering –

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Software Maintenance
 Software is released to end-users, and
 within days, bug reports filter back to the software
engineering organization.
 within weeks, one class of users indicates that the
software must be changed so that it can
accommodate the special needs of their environment.
 within months, another corporate group who
wanted nothing to do with the software when it was
released, now recognizes that it may provide them
with unexpected benefit. They’ll need a few
enhancements to make it work in their world.
 All of this work is software maintenance

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Maintainable Software
 Maintainable software exhibits effective modularity
 It makes use of design patterns that allow ease of
understanding.
 It has been constructed using well-defined coding
standards and conventions, leading to source code that is
self-documenting and understandable.
 It has undergone a variety of quality assurance
techniques that have uncovered potential maintenance
problems before the software is released.
 It has been created by software engineers who recognize
that they may not be around when changes must be
made.
 Therefore, the design and implementation of the software must
“assist” the person who is making the change

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Software Supportability
 “the capability of supporting a software system over its
whole product life.
 This implies satisfying any necessary needs or
requirements, but also the provision of equipment, support
infrastructure, additional software, facilities, manpower, or
any other resource required to maintain the software
operational and capable of satisfying its function.” [SSO08]
 The software should contain facilities to assist support
personnel when a defect is encountered in the
operational environment (and make no mistake, defects
will be encountered).
 Support personnel should have access to a database that
contains records of all defects that have already been
encountered—their characteristics, cause, and cure.

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Reengineering

Business
processes

IT Software
systems Reengineering applications

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Reengineering

Business
processes

IT Software
systems Reengineering applications

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 Software Reengineering

When we need to update

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Reengineering Process
 Decide what to reengineer. Is it the whole
software or part of it.
 Perform reverse engineering in order to obtain
specifications of the existing software
 Restructure the program if required ex:
changing Function oriented programs to object
oriented Programs.
 Restructure data as required.
 Apply Forward engineering concepts in order to
get reengineered software.

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Business Process Reengineering

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Business Process Reengineering
 Business definition. Business goals are identified within the
context of four key drivers: cost reduction, time reduction,
quality improvement, and personnel development and
empowerment.
 Process identification. Processes that are critical to achieving
the goals defined in the business definition are identified.
 Process evaluation. The existing process is thoroughly
analyzed and measured.
 Process specification and design. Based on information
obtained during the first three BPR activities, use-cases are
prepared for each process that is to be redesigned.
 Prototyping. A redesigned business process must be prototyped
before it is fully integrated into the business.
 Refinement and instantiation. Based on feedback from the
prototype, the business process is refined and then instantiated
within a business system.

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Business Process Reengineering
Business
definition

Refinement
&
Instantiation

Prototyping

Process
identification
Process
Specification
and Design

Process
Evaluation

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BPR Principles
 Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
 Have those who use the output of the process perform
the process.
 Incorporate information processing work into the real
work that produces the raw information.
 Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they
were centralized.
 Link parallel activities instead of integrated their results.
When different
 Put the decision point where the work is performed, and
build control into the process.
 Capture data once, at its source.

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Software Reengineering
Forward inventory
engineering analysis

Data document
restructuring restructuring

code reverse
restructuring engineering

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Inventory Analysis
 build a table that contains all applications
 establish a list of criteria, e.g.,
 name of the application
 year it was originally created
 number of substantive changes made to it
 total effort applied to make these changes
 date of last substantive change
 effort applied to make the last change
 system(s) in which it resides
 applications to which it interfaces, ...
 analyze and prioritize to select candidates for
reengineering

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Document Restructuring
 Weak documentation is the trademark of many legacy
systems.
 But what do we do about it? What are our options?
 Options …
 Creating documentation is far too time consuming. If the system
works, we’ll live with what we have. In some cases, this is the
correct approach.
 Documentation must be updated, but we have limited resources.
We’ll use a “document when touched” approach. It may not be
necessary to fully redocument an application.
 The system is business critical and must be fully redocumented.
Even in this case, an intelligent approach is to pare documentation
to an essential minimum.

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Reverse Engineering
dirty source code

restructure
code

clean source code processing

extract
abstractions interface

initial specification database

refine
&
simplify

final specification

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Code Restructuring
 Source code is analyzed using a restructuring tool.
 Poorly design code segments are redesigned
 Violations of structured programming constructs are
noted and code is then restructured (this can be
done automatically)
 The resultant restructured code is reviewed and
tested to ensure that no anomalies have been
introduced
 Internal code documentation is updated.

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Data Restructuring
 Unlike code restructuring, which occurs at a relatively low level
of abstraction, data structuring is a full-scale reengineering
activity
 In most cases, data restructuring begins with a reverse
engineering activity.
 Current data architecture is dissected and necessary data models are
defined.
 Data objects and attributes are identified, and existing data
structures are reviewed for quality.
 When data structure is weak (e.g., flat files are currently
implemented, when a relational approach would greatly simplify
processing), the data are reengineered.
 Because data architecture has a strong influence on program
architecture and the algorithms that populate it, changes to the
data will invariably result in either architectural or code-level
changes.

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Forward Engineering
1. The cost to maintain one line of source code may be 20 to 40
times the cost of initial development of that line.
2. Redesign of the software architecture (program and/or data
structure), using modern design concepts, can greatly facilitate
future maintenance.
3. Because a prototype of the software already exists, development
productivity should be much higher than average.
4. The user now has experience with the software. Therefore, new
requirements and the direction of change can be ascertained with
greater ease.
5. CASE tools for reengineering will automate some parts of the
job.
6. A complete software configuration (documents, programs and
data) will exist upon completion of preventive maintenance.

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 Economics of Reengineering-I
 A cost/benefit analysis model for reengineering has been
proposed by Sneed [Sne95]. Nine parameters are defined:
• P1 = current annual maintenance cost for an application.
• P2 = current annual operation cost for an application.
• P3 = current annual business value of an application.
• P4 = predicted annual maintenance cost after reengineering.
• P5 = predicted annual operations cost after reengineering.
• P6 = predicted annual business value after reengineering.
• P7 = estimated reengineering costs.
• P8 = estimated reengineering calendar time.
• P9 = reengineering risk factor (P9 = 1.0 is nominal).
• L = expected life of the system.

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Economics of Reengineering-II
 The cost associated with continuing maintenance of a
candidate application (i.e., reengineering is not performed)
can be defined as
Cmaint = [P3 - (P1 + P2)] x L

 The costs associated with reengineering are defined using the

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