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Cited by 340

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 22 of the 22 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

LaSSIE: a knowledge-based software information system

Open access
Devanbu, Prem, Brachman, Ron, Selfridge, Peter G., Ballard, Bruce W.·1991·Communications of the ACM

Abstract

The growing cost of software development, particularly in larger systems, is well documented.Efforts at containing this growth have met with limited success.In his classic paper, "No Silver Bullet" [11], Brooks attempts to explain this; he argues that existing developments in software engineering, such as high-level languages, time-sharing and integrated programming environments have overcome certain accidental difficulties in the software development process.However, certain other problems that are the essence of the software process remain.He identifies four essential difficulties in building large software systems as follows:• Complexity: The complexity of the development process, the application domain, the internals of the system, etc.• Conformity: Software cannot have a regular formal structure (like Mathematics or Physics) because it must adapt to interact with people and institutions according to their diverse needs.• Changeability: In any system, the software component is usually the easiest one to modify.• Invisibility: The structure of software (unlike that of buildings or automobiles) is hidden.The only external evidence we have of software is its behavior when executing.

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Metadata

Authors
Devanbu, P., Brachman, R., Selfridge, P. G., & Ballard, B. W.
Venue
Communications of the ACM
Published
1991-05
Volume
34
Issue
5
Pages
34-49
ISSN
  • 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7317
OpenAlex
W1965982049
Cited by
340
References
22
FWCI
100.88
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: LaSSIE: a knowledge-based software information system. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/103167.103172
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Devanbu, P., Brachman, R., Selfridge, P. G., & Ballard, B. W. (1991). LaSSIE: a knowledge-based software information system. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/103167.103172

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.