Software Maintenance

Hatha Systems' Knowledge Refinery provides powerful static analysis capabilities suitable for the ongoing activities of maintenance and enhancements (M&E) of an existing application. Independent studies have shown that static analysis in general can bring a 20 to 30 percent boost to productivity in M&E activities.

The typical M&E operation usually involves a number of steps on the side of the development team:

• Acceptance of a request from an application stakeholder
• Discovery of the code which has to be changed
• An impact analysis of the change to insure the integrity and the correct behavior of the application
• Actual code changes
• Testing
• Change management (verification if the actual changes before release to production)
• Release and user acceptance

The Knowledge Refinery™ can aid in almost any of the steps above. The example below illustrates this.

1. If a computation of an insurance rate must be changed due to the external business conditions, The Knowledge Refinery™ may help to quickly locate the program and the actual lines of code where the computation is performed. The kPath query language implemented by the Knowledge Refinery™ can express extremely granular queries, like "Show the line of code where rate is calculated for an 18 year old driver in the state of Kansas."
2. The Knowledge Refinery™ can help visualize all the data that is affected by the change, so any downstream consequences are immediately discovered.
3. The Knowledge Refinery™ can detect all execution paths leading to the changed code. The execution paths are defined by data conditions which become part of the test cases (for instance, AGE=18, STATE=KANSAS).
4. The Knowledge Refinery™ will show a comparison between the current production version and the newly enhanced version. A change management analyst can then determine any undesired changes were introduced in the code.

Hatha Systems' Knowledge Refinery version comparison analysis