Regaining lost knowledge through dynamic analysis and aspect orientation $an industrial experience report

Abstract

This paper describes our experiences of applying dynamic analysis solutions on an industrial legacy application written in C, with the help of Aspect Orientation (AO).We use a number of dynamic analysis techniques that can help in alleviating the problem of (1)

Using aspect orientation in legacy environments for reverse engineering using dynamic analysis—An industrial experience report

“…3 Aspicere, an AOP language and tool for legacy C systems This section presents our aspect language for C, Aspicere 11 [87]. We consider its rationale, the language itself and the weaver we have developed for it.…”

Scalability solutions for program comprehension through dynamic analysis

“…• box (a) is cohesive as ≥ 50% of the contained procedures originate from one module • box (b) is fully cohesive as all contained procedures originate from the same module • box (c) is non-cohesive as < 50% of the contained procedures originate from one module This schema allowed us to not only quickly audit the system's structure, but also gain insight in wrapper-like solutions and procedures implementing low-level functionality [11]. …”

“…In [11] we applied this approach on an industrial legacy C system. In contrast to the open source case studies where we had to rely on documentation available on the internet, we were now able to validate the results we obtained with the original developers and current maintainers of the application.…”

“…The mechanism to log calls and returns differs depending on the case study. For our Java case studies, we used a custom-made JVMPI profiler 2 , while for our industrial case study, which was entirely written in C, we relied on Aspicere, an aspectweaver-framework for C [11]. The last two steps are technique-dependent and will be discussed in the subsequent sections.…”

Understanding Ajax applications by connecting client and server-side execution traces

“…Since traces may quickly grow to massive proportions (Zaidman et al 2006b(Zaidman et al , 2005(Zaidman et al , 2006a, we need ways to deal with their size (Cornelissen et al 2009a). We consider two common ways to do so: trace reduction and trace visualization, which are often combined.…”