Software Knowledge Representation to Understand Software Systems

Abstract

A software development process involves numerous persons, including customers, domain experts, software engineers, managers, evaluators and certifiers. Together, they produce some software that satisfies its requirements and its quality criteria at a certain point in time. This software contains faults and flaws of different levels of severity and at different phases of its production (specification, design, etc.) so maintenance is needed in order to correct it. Perfective and adaptive maintenance is also needed to cope with changes in the environment or with new requirements, e.g. new functionalities. In this work, we introduce the Persistent Knowledge Monitor (PKM), which is being developed within the DECODER H2020 project for handling (i.e. storing, retrieving, merging and checking for consistency) all kinds of knowledge and information related to a software project. The PKM will be part of a platform capable of taking advantage of all the artefacts available in a software ecosystem, not only the source code, but also its version control system, abstract specifications, informal documents or reports, etc. for representing the software knowledge and improving the workflow of software developers.