Browse Theses

The characteristics of the development of large software systems are well known. While the cost of hardware has decreased rapidly in the computing systems, the development of the software systems is haunted with ever increasing costs, missed schedules, and unreliable products.

Although there is no one single magic solution to solve this Software Crisis, it has been recognized that the widespread use of integrated environments, such as Unix and Interlisp, has helped to increase the quality of the software systems and the productivity in developing the systems. This breakthrough, in turn, stimulated the development of many new environments which are subject of much of today's software engineering research.

With these goals in mind, to increase the quality and productivity in developing software systems, a methodology and its integrated environment, SOFTMAN, is proposed. SOFTMAN supports not only engineering large software systems, but it also supports the evolution of non-engineered software systems by utilizing the concept of reverse software engineering.

In this thesis we describe SOFTMAN's approach to the engineering of large scale software systems and explore the concepts, issues and problems of reverse software engineering. To show the feasibility of SOFTMAN's approach to software engineering and reverse software engineering, we build a SOFTMAN prototype environment by selecting, and then configuring, a set of necessary tools.

We believe that the SOFTMAN environment will provide a capability and direction for supporting the development of large-scale software in a productive manner, reducing the complexity and difficulties of maintaining and understanding many engineered and non-engineered software systems. (Copies available exclusively from Micrographics Department, Doheny Library, USC, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0182.)