Abstract

This thesis presents a hypertext browser tool mainly for maintenance phase of software development. As the maintenance phase is the most costly and time-consuming phase in the whole process of software development and system evolution, our tool is aimed at providing support to maintenance programmers for better understanding of existing code and maintaining of large applications. With this tool, programmers can setup link between identifiers and their definitions, browse through source code, have easy access to definitions of any user defined identifiers and routines through hypertext, and inspect each occurrences of an identifier, which can be highlighted in browser window, of any file. But our tool is not limited to the maintenance phase activities. It can be used in any phases with text documentation, such as the important phases like the design and implementation phases. Our tool can also provide assistance to designers and developers by supporting documentation inspection. In this thesis, we surveyed software development environments and supporting tools. From our survey, we understand the development history and future directions in this area. This helps the design and implementation decisions of our tool. Some future applications of this tool are also discussed. Our tool will be more completed and helpful to maintenance programmers with these future enhancement. We believe this will brighten the future of our tool.