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From: rbogen@SUN.COM (Richard Bogen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: AI & Software Engineering]
Message-ID: <19880610203459.8.NICK@INTERLAKEN.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 10 Jun 88 20:34:00 GMT
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Date: Fri, 10 Jun 88 12:30 EDT
From: Richard Bogen <rbogen@Sun.COM>
To: AIList-REQUEST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU
Subject: AI & Software Engineering

I am interested in leads on any papers or research concerned with applications
of AI to the production of complex software products such as Operating Systems.
I feel that there is a tremendous amount of useful information in the heads of
the software developers concerning dependencies between the various data
structures and procedures which compose the system.  Much of this could also be
derived automatically from the compiler and linker when the OS is built. It
would require a rather large database to store all of this but imagine how
useful it would be to the support people and to the people developing products
dependent upon the OS (such as datacomm subsystems).  With a front-end query
language they could check the database for the expected impact of any changes
they were about to make to the system possibily avoiding the time consuming
debugging process of reading a dump later on.  Furthermore it would be possible
to automatically generate a dump formatting program and an online monitor
program from the data stucture declarations in the source code.  By using
include files these programs could always be kept up-to-date whenever the
OS was changed.