Design Issues for Software Analysis and Maintenance Tools

Software maintainers have long been acutely aware of the challenges involved in managing software change processes. Activities such as software migration, restructuring and reengineering all involve source code modification. They rely heavily on analysis and comprehension of the complex system structures and interactions that characterize both legacy and modern software systems. It is widely accepted that tools that support software analysis and maintenance tasks would go a long way towards addressing the constraints that software developers and maintainers work with on a day-to-day basis. Nevertheless, despite an abundance of tools, not many are used by practitioners and very few are considered essential for a particular development or maintenance task. This workshop examined design issues related to the development and application of tools to support software analysis and maintenance