Cost-Effective Maintenance Tools for Proprietary Languages

  • Authors:
  • Merijn de Jonge;Ramin Monajemi

  • Affiliations:
  • CWI;Lucent Technologies

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '01 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'01)
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Maintenance of proprietary languages and corresponding tooling is expensive. Postponing maintenance to reduce these costs is an often applied, short-term solution which eventually may lead to an unoperational toolset. This paper describes a case study carried out in cooperation with Lucent Technologies where maintenance cost is decreased by simplifying the development process of languages and tools. The development process is simplified by using a language-centered software engineering approach which increases software reuse and language dependent code generation. The case study was concerned with Lucent's proprietary SDL dialect and involved the re-engineering of an SDL grammar and the construction of an SDL documentation generator.