Communications of the ACM articles from May 1994

Communications of the ACM archives from May 1994

Editorial pointers.
May 1, 1994... The blueprint for this issue is Reverse Engineeing, or how your technology investment can grow, bend or respond to changing business requirements. It's not about buying new software components, it's about understanding existing components and...

Newstrack.
May 1, 1994... PREMATURE SYSTEM... In an effort to counterattack the rash of fraudulent tax returns filed electronically, the IRS set up supercomputers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to detect anomalies in returns and uncover suspicious patterns....

Forum. (Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 1994... EDUCATIONAL STRATEGIES AND HYPERTEXT After reading Colin Davies' "Forum" letter ("An Open Letter to Academia," Feb. 1994, p.13) and the article by Elliot Soloway ("Ways of Seeing," Feb. 1994, p.15), I checked the date on the cover. I have...

Software reengineering: a quick history.
May 1, 1994... Perhaps the most well-known early work on reengineering --though not called that at the time--started with Bohm and Jacopini's 1966 Communications article. This article provided, in a theorem's constructive proof, a way to convert a flowgraph...

Dad's invisible guard-all shield. (Cold War concepts incompatible with 1990s technology) (Electronic Frontier) (Column)
May 1, 1994... The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. Some years back, when I was still a Wyoming environmentalist, I found myself crossing South Pass with an old sheep rancher I knew. We were going to a federal...

Tractor factories and research in software design. (suggestions for designing educational software that entices students to learn) (Log on Education) (Column)
May 1, 1994... Researchers in educational technology, as well as those interested in the results of this research, often have a mistaken notion of what constitutes technological research in this field. Typically, when a piece of educational software is...

Reverse engineering. (brief summary of some of the papers presented at the May 1993 Association for Computing Machinery/IEEE Computer Society's Working Conference on Reverse Engineering)
May 1, 1994... Reverse engineering encompasses a wide array of tasks related to understanding and modifying software systems. Central to these tasks is identifying the components of an existing software system and the relationships among them. Also central...

DOD legacy systems; reverse engineering data requirements. (excerpt from paper presented at the May 1993 Association of Computing Machinery/IEEE Computer Society's Working Conference on Reverse Engineering)
May 1, 1994... The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) currently maintains more than 1.4 billion lines of code associated with thousands of heterogeneous, noncombat information systems at more than 1,700 data centers [4, 11]. This enormous inventory of often...

An approach for reverse engineering of relational databases. (excerpt from paper presented at the May 1993 Association of Computing Machinery/IEEE Computer Society's Working Conference on Reverse Engineering) (Tutorial)
May 1, 1994... The rationale for reengineering is straightforward: new software is expensive to develop, but old software can be costly to maintain and adapt to new uses. The goal of reengineering is to mechanically reuse past development efforts in order to...

Automated support for legacy code understanding. (excerpt from paper presented at the May 1993 Association for Computing Machinery/IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering)
May 1, 1994... Many large companies are facing a problem: their legacy systems are inhibiting their businesses growth and capacity to change. This problem can be approached in a number of ways. One way is to simply get rid of a legacy system, replacing it...

Using an enabling technology to reengineer legacy systems. (Boeing Computer Services undertakes payroll modularization project) (excerpt from paper presented at the May 1993 Association of Computing Machinery/IEEE Computer Society's Working Conference on Reverse Engineering)
May 1, 1994... BOX 1 Reengineering a major line-of-business system can be likened to changing a tire on a moving vehcile. You undertake it only when a system has grown to such complexity that its maintenance has become a major consumer of...

Program understanding and the concept assignment problem. (includes related articles on program-understanding research and technology, automatic concept recognition and a glossary of terms) (excerpt from paper presented at the May 1993 Association of Computing Machinery/IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering)
May 1, 1994... Related Research and Technology A variety of technologies address facets of the program-understanding problem. The approaches taken the facilities included vary widely based on the research or technology purpose. A few broad...

A memory-based approach to recognizing programming plans. (use of automated program understanding to facilitate C to C++ migration) (excerpt from paper presented at the May 1993 Association for Computing Machinery/IEEE Computer Society's Working Conference on Reverse Engineering)
May 1, 1994... Automated program understanding can be viewed as the process of automatically extracting design knowledge from source code. Past research efforts have automatically extracted and used this knowledge to restructure programs [4], to tutor novice...

Adaptive object-oriented programming using graph-based customization.
May 1, 1994... Graph-Based Customization Object-oriented programs are easier to extend than programs that are not written in an object-oriented style, but object-oriented programs are still very rigid and difficult to adapt and maintain. A key feature...

Requirements specification: learning object, process, and data methodologies. (comparison of effectiveness of three methodologies based on study of six novice systems analysts)
May 1, 1994... Specifying information requirements--determining and documenting the requirements for an information system, is arguably the key to developing successful information systems (IS). Since this is the first step in the systems development...

Career opportunities. (computer science field)
May 1, 1994... Academia Sinica Institute of Information Science Taiwan, Republic of China Applications are invited for research positions in Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica. Ph.D. in Computer Science or closely related fields required....

Inside risks. (approaches for developing secure, one-time passwords) (Inside Risks) (Column)
May 1, 1994... The previous installment of "Inside RISKS" considered risks inherent in resuable passwords. We now consider some alternatives that considerably reduce those risks. We also characterize the overall system requirements for authentication,...