Abstract

There are many commercial tools that address various aspects of the Year 2000 problem. None of these tools, however, make any documented use of plan-based techniques for automated concept recovery. This implies a general perception that plan-based techniques is not useful for this problem. This paper argues that this perception is incorrect and these techniques are in fact mature enough to make a significant contribution. In particular, we show representative code fragments illustrating "Year 2000" problems, discuss the problems inherent in recognizing the higher level concepts these fragments implement using pattern-based and rule-based techniques, demonstrate that they can be represented in a programming plan framework, and present some initial experimental evidence that suggests that current algorithms can locate these plans in linear time. Finally, we discuss several ways to integrate plan-based techniques with existing Year 2000 tools. 1991 Computing Reviews Classification System: D.2.2, D.2.3, D.2.7., D.3.4, F.3.1, I.2.2. Keywords and Phrases: Software maintenance, program understanding, plan-based concept recovery, COBOL, Y2K. Note: To appear in Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, October, 1997 Note: Work carried out under project SEN-1.1, Software Renovation. 1

Citations