A collaborative platform for application knowledge management in software maintenance projects

Abstract

In the era of global outsourcing, maintenance and enhancement activities are performed in distributed locations. In most cases, the domain expertise is not available which increases the complexity to manifold. A critical success factor in such a scenario is to have a collaborative platform for managing and sharing the domain specific knowledge across distributed locations. In our ongoing research we have developed a human assisted collaborative knowledge sharing tool called CollabDev. The aim of this tool is to analyze applications in multiple languages and render various structural, architectural, and functional insights to the people involved in maintenance. The novelty of this platform lies in integrating different elements of application knowledge by linking them to source code and allowing multiple developers to collaborate on-line by using annotations for the knowledge elements. The platform also provides diagnostic information on architecture of source code. © 2008 ACM.