Knowledge engineering emerged as a very promising area to help improve software engineering practice. One of its possible applications would be to help in solving the numerous problems that affect the software maintenance activity. Maintainers of legacy systems developed years ago with obsolete techniques and tools, and not documented, need all kinds of knowledge (application domain, programmin...

Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools have been advocated for improving maintainer productivity and the quality of maintained software. While there is evidence that such benefits can accrue to organizations adopting maintenance-oriented CASE tools, a key problem in achieving the desired benefits from CASE tools is low usage of these tools by programmers. The previously tested Mainten...

This paper reports about experiences in managing the transformation from internal development and maintenance of software engineering tools towards an external one. We describe three different interorganizational cooperation forms which differ in the distribution of development responsibilities between client and vendor – and which support the distributed design of three different classes of so...

This paper provides an overview of the relationship between recent work in logic programming and recent developments in software engineering. The relationship to software engineering is more speciically concerned with how formal speciications can be used to explain and represent the basis of software maintenance and evolution. Some of the results reviewed here have appeared in 5] and 13]. These...

War stories are a form of qualitative data that capture informants’ speciWc accounts of surmounting great challenges. The rich contextual detail aVorded by this approach warrants its inclusion in the methodological arsenal of empirical software engineering research. We ground this assertion in an exemplar Weld study that examined the use of documentation in software maintenance environments. Sp...

The IEEE defines software engineering as, "The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software; that is, the application of engineering to software." As software is the result of software engineering, if software is in crisis then software engineering itself is in crisis. We argue that software engineering is indeed in c...