Software Defect Report and Tracking System in the Internet: Controlling the Evolution of Legacy Systems

This paper describes a project of Empirical Software Engineering that uses Internet technology to implement a software defect report and tracking system, called SofTrack, in a geographically distributed organisation. SofTrack is being used to help controlling the evolution of four medium to large size software systems, on different levels of maturity. They belong to the Portuguese Navy Information Systems Infrastructure and were developed using typical legacy systems technology: COBOL with embedded SQL for queries in a Relational Database environment.

While SofTrack provides the typical functionality of tracking systems, it also embeds tools for the automatic documentation of source code and software complexity analysis. This combination of features helps the management of the maintenance team activity.