[SystemSafety] Modelling and coding guidelines: "Unambiguous Graphical Representation"

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2016-03-04 09:22 , David MENTRE wrote:
> Le 04/03/2016 01:38, Steve Tockey a écrit :
>> Of course code has a finite lifetime. But I think it's worth asking, "what
>> drives that lifetime to be what it is?" I see two drivers. One is product
>> (functional) obsolescence,... The other is deterioration.
> 
> In fact, David L. Parnas expressed the very same idea in 1994: ;-)
>   "Software Aging"

It's way older than that. In the 1980's already there was a significant market for SW reengineering.

The market leader was Bachman Information Systems, founded in 1983, which became Cayenne in 1996 and
then Sterling Software in 1998. They reverse-engineered SW that could no longer effectively be
maintained, I understand specialising in financial-system and insurance SW. Charlie Bachman had won
the Turing Award already in 1973. I worked intermittently with a smaller Palo Alto company,
Reasoning Systems, now defunct, which had a software system called REFINE which could take apart and
functionally restructure source code in arbitrary programming languages and dialects. Reasoning used
it, as also the SW-reengineering part of Anderson Consulting, now Accenture.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de





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