A NEW APPROACH TO FINDING OBJECTS IN PROGRAMS

Software maintenance is difficult and costly because the maintainer must understand the existing relationships in the maintained code. The maintainer's job can be made considerably easier if the objects in the code (related groups of types, data, and procedures) are identified. In this paper, we discuss methods for identifying objects in programs, and present a new approach that relies on these key features. First, our internal program representation (IPR) lets us make a more precise identification of objects than previous methods allowed. Second, we introduce the idea of receiver-based object identification. Third, we introduce the idea of two-step object identification, which gives the user greater control in precisely identifying objects. Our object finding tool can be used with the other tools our IPR provides to create an integrated software maintenance environment.