What can program supervision do for program reuse?

Abstract

The authors are interested in knowledge-based techniques (called program supervision) for managing the reuse of a modular set of programs. The focus of the paper is to analyse which reuse problems program supervision techniques can solve. First, they propose a general definition for program supervision, a knowledge representation model, and a reasoning model. They then analyse program supervision solution for reuse in terms of the structure of the programs to re-use and in terms of the effort for building a program supervision knowledge base. The paper concludes with what program supervision can do for program reuse from the points of view of the code developers, the experts, and the end-users.