A general framework for interconnecting annotations of software systems

Computer-supported annotation of software systems and their documentation, including design documentation and source code, is a common and important software engineering activity. Annotated documentation is used in both formal software inspection and informal software maintenance. Viewers of annotated systems may understand the software more easily if annotations are visible not just from the annotated item itself but from other, related items. We propose a general framework for interconnecting annotatable items in software systems to achieve this visibility. We describe filtering and broadening rules that viewers can use to select the annotations they desire to see. We illustrate this framework in the context of object-oriented software system development.