Alan Gunderson
GTE Government Systems Corporation
77 A Street
Needham, MA 02194
Norman Wilde
University of West Florida
Pensacola, Florida 32514, USA
e-mail: 
Christopher Casey
University of West Florida
Pensacola, Florida 32514, USA
SOFTWARE RECONNAISSANCE is a technique to aid maintainers of unfamiliar code in locating program features that they may need to understand or modify. The Software Engineering Research Center is conducting a series of trials of Software Reconnaissance at its industrial affiliates to provide insight into its use, to give feedback that can improve the prototype Reconnaissance tools, and to illuminate the process of technology transfer from SERC researchers to affiliate companies.
This report describes one such trial involving the GTE Government Systems Intelligent Software Agent project. The report discusses experience in using Reconnaissance to understand the InterBase system for multi-database access, which was being used as part of that project. This was the first trial of Reconnaissance on a multi-process system.
Reconnaissance was effective in the debugging scenario that is described. However, work-arounds were needed to handle forks and some deficiencies in the current Reconnaissance toolset were identified. The lessons learned from this experience are being fed back into the development of the next version of the tools.
We believe that the results of this study show that Software Reconnaissance is likely to be useful to maintainers of systems such as InterBase and we plan to continue work to make this technology available to SERC affiliates.
This report may be cited as SERC-TR-77-F, Software Engineering Research Center, University of Florida, CSE-301, Gainesville, FL 32611, March 1995.
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