A compendium of formal techniques for software maintenance

Software maintenance is an important area in practical software engineering that has been largely overlooked by many theoretical computer scientists. This paper gives an overview of formal techniques developed recently to aid the software maintenance process, and in particular reverse engineering and re-engineering. In the future, it is suggested that specifications, rather than programs, should be maintained. The described work provides a mathematical basis for a large collaborative project, which has also been investigating many other aspects of software maintenance.

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