One of the main reasons that people are in the software loop is to maintain the link between the domain (“What does this software do?”) and the implementation (“How does this software work?”). Without such a link, it would be impossible to instantiate a desired change of domain--a functional change or a correction--as a change of implementation. Therefore, one might expect to see many software tools supporting this linkage--tools that would link the language of the domain to the language of the implementation.

Few such software tools exist, and little has been written about such tools. Therefore, this paper, which describes such a tool, is rare and valuable. The tool itself, built for hardware and software engineers working on IBM mainframe operating systems, links a static and dynamic code analyzer (CodeNavigator) to a hypertext-linked textual database (TRAILS). The key linkage seems to be between names of code objects (“the module CLRLGCPY”) and descriptors assigned to text fragments. Windowed point-and-switch interfaces are provided both within and between the two types of tool. The integrated system is called ISEA (Integrated Software Engineering Applications)

The system is only a prototype, and was created for internal use. The author does not comment on its functional success, client acceptance, or future. Nevertheless, this paper is important because it is so rare. The only other more than perfunctory description of such a tool that I know of is in Reid [1].