AUTOMATED HYPERTEXT SUPPORT FOR SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE

A model called HyperSoft is presented, which can be used for viewing p rograms as hypertext, The main goal in developing the model has been t o offer a framework for new program browsing tools to support the main tenance of legacy software in particular, The model consists of four l ayers: source code as such, its syntactic structure, hypertextual acce ss structures based on the source code and its syntax, and the user in terface for viewing and manipulating the source code and the access st ructures, The access structures are based on a general relational mode l of program dependencies, Both the hypertextual software model and th e program dependency model are language independent and provide for a systematic and automated way of representing programs as different kin ds of dependency graphs. The models are implemented in a program brows ing tool which analyses C programs and automatically generates relevan t hypertextual representations for them, according to requests of the maintainer.