Alborz: An Interactive Toolkit to Extract Static and Dynamic Views of a Software System

Sartipi, Kamran; Ye, L.; Safyallah, H.

doi:10.1109/icpc.2006.8

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The developed dynamic analysis tool is an Eclipse plugin [2] and has been developed as an extension to the Alborz reverse engineering toolkit [31] to enhance the scope of Alborz to cover both static and dynamic analysis of a software system.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Knowledge Extraction From Software Systems Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Sartipi

Safyallah

2010

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

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Software system analysis for identifying software functionality in source code remains a major problem in the reverse engineering literature. The early approaches for extracting software functionality mainly relied on static properties of software system. However, the static approaches by nature suffer from the lack of semantic and hence are not appropriate for this task. This paper presents a novel technique for dynamic analysis of software systems to identify the implementation of certain software functionality known as software features. In the proposed approach, a specific feature is shared by a number of task scenarios that are applied on the software system to generate execution traces. The application of a sequential pattern mining technique on the generated execution traces allows us to extract execution patterns that reveal the specific feature functionality. In a further step, the extracted execution patterns are distributed over a concept lattice to separate feature-specific group of functions from commonly used group of functions. The use of lattice also allows for identifying a family of closely related features in the source code. Moreover, in this work we provide a set of metrics for evaluating the structural merits of the software system such as component cohesion and functional scattering. We have implemented a prototype toolkit and experimented with two case studies Xfig drawing tool and Pine email client with very promising results. deals with task scenarios that formulate the user-system interactions in an informal or semi-formal manner. The approaches to dynamic analysis cover areas such as performance optimization [25], software execution visualization [23], and feature to code assignment [13], where in this work we address the latter problem. Typically, to understand the implementation of a certain feature of a system, maintainers refer to the documentation of the software system which is tedious and is not applicable in many cases. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to dynamic analysis of software systems, in order to identify the implementation of the software features without any prior knowledge about its source code implementation. In this context, dynamic analysis is performed by executing a group of well-defined task scenarios on the software system and by analyzing the execution results. Dynamic analysis with its characteristics to extract system functionality has several challenges compared to the static analysis: (i) in static analysis usually a complete set of software facts are generated through parsing or lexical analysis of the source code based on a domain model, whereas in dynamic analysis only a small subset of the possible dynamic traces are extracted; (ii) obtaining meaningful knowledge from the extracted execution traces is a difficult task that restricts the applicability of the dynamic analysis; and (iii) the large sizes of the execution traces caused by program loops and recursions may disable the whole dynamic analysis.In this work, we define a set of task sce...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Knowledge Extraction From Software Systems Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Sartipi

Safyallah

2010

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

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“…The recovery of the system architecture for software comprehension is not a novelty. Tools like Alborz [27] or Bauhaus [24] recover the blueprints of an object-oriented system. Bauhaus recovers architectures as a graph where the nodes may be types, routines, files or components of the system, and the edges model the relations between these nodes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domain-specific language for coordination patterns

2011

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The integration and composition of software systems requires a good architectural design phase to speed up communications between (remote) components. However, during implementation phase, the code to coordinate such components often ends up mixed in the main business code. This leads to maintenance problems, raising the need for, on the one hand, separating the coordination code from the business code, and on the other hand, providing mechanisms for analysis and comprehension of the architectural decisions once made. In this context our aim is at developing a domain-specific language, CoordL, to describe typical coordination patterns. From our point of view, coordination patterns are abstractions, in a graph form, over the composition of coordination statements from the system code. These patterns would allow us to identify, by means of pattern-based graph search strategies, the code responsible for the coordination of the several components in a system. The recovering and separation of the architectural decisions for a better comprehension of the software is the main purpose of this pattern language.

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“…The contributions of this paper are as follows: i) providing a pattern-based structural reconstruction technique to control the dynamic interaction of cohesive components; ii) modeling a multi-view reconstruction approach as a Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problem; and iii) enhancing Alborz toolkit [14] to perform the proposed multi-view recovery.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Amalgamated Dynamic and Static Architecture Reconstruction Framework to Control Component Interactions 259

Sartipi

Dezhkam

2007

14th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2007)

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View-based software development is well adopted in forward engineering. However, most reverse engineering techniques still consider a single view of a software system with restricted scope of analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that amalgamates dynamic and static views of a software system. The dynamic view is represented through profiling information that is extracted from executing a set of task scenarios that cover frequently used software features. The obtained profiling information is then embedded into a static view recovery process. We propose a pattern based structure recovery, as static view, that defines the high-level architecture of the software system using abstract components and interconnections that is defined using an architecture query language (AQL). In this context, both static and dynamic aspects of the software system are used to collect software entities into cohesive components whose dynamic interactions can be controlled. The whole recovery process is modeled as a Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problem (VCSP). A case study with promising results on the Xfig drawing tool has also been presented.

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Alborz: An Interactive Toolkit to Extract Static and Dynamic Views of a Software System

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

Dynamic Knowledge Extraction From Software Systems Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Dynamic Knowledge Extraction From Software Systems Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Domain-specific language for coordination patterns

An Amalgamated Dynamic and Static Architecture Reconstruction Framework to Control Component Interactions 259

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