Benefits of reverse engineering technologies in software development makerspace

Abstract

Abstract. In the recent decades, the amount of data produced by scientific, engineering, and life science applications has increased with several orders of magnitude. In parallel with this development, the applications themselves have become increasingly complex in terms of functionality, structure, and behavior. In the same time, development and production cycles of such applications exhibit a tendency of becoming increasingly shorter, due to factors such as market pressure and rapid evolution of supporting and enabling technologies. As a consequence, an increasing fraction of the cost of creating new applications and manufacturing processes shifts from the creation of new artifacts to the adaption of existing ones. A key component of this activity is the understanding of the design, operation, and behavior of existing manufactured artifacts, such as software code bases, hardware systems, and mechanical assemblies. For instance, in the software industry, it is estimated that maintenance costs exceed 80% of the total costs of a software product's lifecycle, and software understanding accounts for as much as half of these maintenance costs. To facilitate the software development process, it would be ideal to have tools that automatically generate or help to generate UML (Unified Modeling Language) models from source code. Reverse engineering the software architecture from source code provides a valuable service to software practitioners. Case tools implementing MDA and reverse-engineering constitute an important opportunity of software development engineers. So MDA and reverse engineering is an important key witch make makerspace more productive and more efficient.

A methodology of automatic class diagrams generation from source code using Model-Driven Architecture and Machine Learning to achieve Energy Efficiency

“…Reverse engineering is used to find missing data, enhance or offer documentation, find negative effects, reuse parts, and lessen maintenance requirements. [11] Graph neural networks (GNNs) are an effective method for solving a variety of NLP issues.…”

“…In [2], the authors propose a method based on Petri nets that can generate a sequence diagram understanding the behavior of an object-oriented system using reverse engineering. In this paper [3] researchers represent a novel method for extracting UML2 state machine diagrams from object-oriented java source code using Nested choice patterns. Also in [4] a strategy is shown to investigate creative approaches to instruction and evaluation that encourage students to learn programming effectively, according to the suggested technique, when a user inserts source code into a visualization tool, it will be transformed into a class diagram and a sequence diagram based on what the user specifies.…”

Method for Reverse Engineering UML Use Case Model for Websites

“…Reverse engineering UML diagrams from websites without access to source code can be useful in various situations, e.g. during analysis of undocumented legacy systems for finding out their functionality or for comparing functionality of existing public websites [1]. Furthermore, reverse engineering UML diagrams excluding analysis of source code ensures that our approach is language independent, which broadens the set of web applications that can be reverse engineered using our method.…”