Results of the CARES project
The Cargo Assembly Re-engineering Support (CARES) project, which was financed under the EU's research programme in the field of Information Technologies (ESPRIT), has produced results of potentially broad application. The aim of the project was to establish the degree to which reverse and re-engineering technology could assist in improving the maintenance process for large systems written in Assembly, a computer programming language. The maintenance of such systems poses various problems, due to both system size and age, as well as the relative lack of programmers familiar with the language. The project consisted of a set of tools to help in the daily software maintenance work tested on the cargo management system of the airline Iberia. The main results of the project are: - An object-oriented model of the IBM 370 Assembly language; - A set of software tools comprising a common object-oriented repository, a set of identification and modification procedure models and tools; - A practical evaluation of the adequacy, performance and usability of the tools. The advantages that the results of CARES bring to business include that the programs documentation is updated in a shorter time, tools to navigate and exploit the data are now available, cost reduction and increased maintenance productivity as well as the potential commercial aspects of the product for other airlines.