An Orchestrated Multi-view Software Architecture Reconstruction Environment

14th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2007)

Dezhkam

2007

Self Cite

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.

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

14th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2007)

Dezhkam

2007

Self Cite

“…The combination of dynamic analysis with static analysis of software system is considered as a very promising approach [3,7,4]. These techniques usually produce independent views, not an integration of both views.…”

Section: Highlights Of the Toolkitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alborz toolkit allows us to inject software behavioral information (stemmed from task scenarios or use cases) into static analysis of the system in order to adjust the static analysis to produce more sensible results. This approach uses feature to source code assignment to localize the core functions that implement specific software operations (features) [6] and then uses the core functions as the seeds in a software clustering technique to collect functions into software modules or components that correspond to specific operations of the software system [4].…”

Section: Highlights Of the Toolkitmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Multi-view Toolkit to Assist Software Integration and Evolution

11th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'07)

2007

Self Cite

Software product line engineering aims at producing functionally similar software systems as a family of products. In this process, the development life cycle has been shifted from traditional activities into reusecentric and customizable component approaches. In software product line engineering from existing systems many technical, organizational, and user-adoption problems need to be dealt with by the means of proper tool support. In this context, we provide a supporting toolkit that blends the behavior and structure recovery techniques in order to localize the major components of the existing systems as candidates for generic or reusable components. An integration of the reusable and new components will form a domain reference architecture, whose instantiation will produce the products. For each new product the scattering of the added features in the structure of the original components will be determined by the means of two metrics to assess the functional cohesion and feature functional scattering. This allows us to control the structural evolution of the product line engineering process.

“…The proposed structural assessment directly represents the cohesion of module(s) implementing a specific feature; this measure of cohesion is much closer to the original definition of cohesion ("relative functional strength of a module" [24]) than using static structural techniques such as inter-/intra-edge connectivity of the components. Furthermore, each group of core functions that implement a feature can be used to incorporate semantics into the existing software architecture recovery techniques [29].This paper has been organized as follows. Related work is discussed in Sec.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Knowledge Extraction From Software Systems Using Sequential Pattern Mining

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

Safyallah

2010

Self Cite

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...