AN IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OBJECT-ORIENTED RULED-BASED APPROACH TO ENHANCE SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE

Abstract

Over the years considerable work has been undertaken to develop an efficient systems development method to handle creation of complex and large systems. Many system development methodologies have been designed over the last few years under such influence and motivation, but these methodologies stress mostly on system creation rather than system maintenance. The emphasis was placed on how effectively a software system should be created but only little attention was paid to how this system could be efficiently and economically maintained. It is now known that to maintain a software system is much more costly than to build one. The problem of maintaining these information systems have received wide attention. It is believed to be their inflexibility to change, compounded by the fact that most contemporary software processes fail to adequately address the specific problem of system evolution. This dissertation documents an implementation an Object-Oriented approach to enhance software maintenance, based on the explicit representation of business policies. The approach combines the merit of object-oriented paradigm, which makes use of reusability and inheritance to enhance maintainability of the system, and rule representation scheme, which recognises the explicit separation of business policies from programming code. A rule model is incorporated into the overall system to specify all the business policies of an information system. The approach also maintains the visibility of those parts of system which are most volatile and thus subject to change. The result of which is greater ease in accommodating those changes, thereby reducing software maintenance costs.