Redocumentation: addressing the maintenance legacy

Over the past decade or so there has been much attention paid to techniques and methodologies to produce high-quality systems. A concurrent development has been the emergence of software tools that aid in the production and maintenance of software systems; yet the maintenance environment continues to be littered with poorly written and poorly documented programs. The focus of this paper is to outline a conceptual approach to the allocation of software maintenance resources and the role of automated tools in this process. It is contended that software maintenance tools cannot be simply purchased or built and then used indiscriminately. Rather, it takes an administrative activity to quantitatively decide which code units are best for resource allocation. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of this approach, a case study based on the author's experience is presented.