EVALUATING THEORIES FOR MANAGING IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE IN HUMAN-CENTRIC DATABASE REENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS

Modernizing heavily evolved and poorly documented information systems is a central software engineering problem in our current IT industry. It is often necessary to reverse engineer the design documentation of such legacy systems. Several interactive CASE tools have been developed to support this human-intensive process. However, practical experience indicates that their applicability is limited because they do not adequately handle imperfect knowledge about legacy systems. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of several major theories of imperfect knowledge management in the area of soft computing and approximate reasoning. The theories are evaluated with respect to how well they meet requirements for generating effective human-centred reverse engineering environments. The requirements were elicited with help from practical case studies in the area of database reverse engineering. A particular theory called "possibilistic logic" was found to best meet these requirements most comprehensively. This evaluation highlights important challenges to the designers of knowledge management techniques, and should help reverse engineering tool implementers select appropriate technologies.