A CONSTRUCTING METHOD OF FUNCTIONAL-MODEL BY INTEGRATED LEARNING FROMEXAMPLES OF SOFTWARE MODIFICATION

One approach to develop software efficiently is to reuse existing soft ware by modifying a part of it. However, modifying software will often introduce unexpected side effects into other parts of it. As a result , it costs much time and care to modify the software. So, in order to modify software efficiently, we have proposed a functional model to re present information about side effects caused by modification and a mo del based supporting system for modifying software. So far, however, a n expert software developer must describe the entire functional model of the target software through the analysis of practical modifying pro cesses. This will be an unnecessary burden on him. Moreover, the large r target software becomes, the harder the model construction becomes. Therefore, an automatic constructing method of the functional model is needed in order to solve this problem. So, this paper considers a met hod of acquiring useful interaction information by learning from train ing examples of modification. However, in our application domain, it s eems that it is impossible to make complete domain theory and to prepa re a large number of training examples in advance. Therefore, our lear ning method involves an integration of explanation-based learning (EEL ) from positive examples of modification generated by the user and Sim ilarity-based learning (SBL) from positive or negative examples genera ted by the user and the learning system. As a result, our method can a cquire valid knowledge about the interaction from not so many examples under incomplete theory. Then, this paper presents a constructing met hod, in which our proposed learning method is incorporated, of a funct ional model. Finally, this paper demonstrates construction of the func tional model in the domain of an event-driven queueing simulation prog ram according to our learning method.