Reverse engineering to the architectural level

Abstract

Recovery of higher level "design" information and the ability to create dynamic, task adaptable software documentation is crucial to supporting a number of program understanding activities. This paper presents research that demonstrates that reverse engineering technology can be used to recover software architecture representations of source code.We have developed a framework that integrates reverse engineering technology and architectural style representations.Using the framework, analysts can recover custom, dynamic documentation to fit a variety of software analysis requirements.Our goal is to establish coherent abstractions appropriate for helping analysts to understand large software systems. We discuss a code coverage metric useful for assessing the degree of program understanding achieved.

Modularizing Legacy System through an Improved Bunch Clustering Method in Cloud Migration

“…Rigi used clustering to form cohesive subsystems [15]; Harris et al used clustering of files to support their bottom-up recovery process [16]; Sartipi et al used an approach based on association rule mining and clustering to recover system's architecture [17]. Unlike other software clustering tools, Bunch clustering system uses search techniques to perform clustering, which decomposes legacy system into subsystems by partitioning the entity and relation graph of the legacy code.…”

Enabling the Refinement of a Software Architecture into a Design

“…This involves obtaining from the UML model a description similar to the one represented in an ADL, using either formal transformations [9] or various reverse engineering heuristics (e.g., [15]). …”

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“…This thesis is about the analysis of software quality attributes of existing systems using ARE. Several ARE approaches were already existing when we started our work in 1999, for example (Müller et al 1993, Krikhaar 1999, Harris et al 1995b, Eixelsberger et al 1998, Guo et al 1999, Bowman et al 1999. Our initial attention was on the DALI workbench ) and the Portable Book-shelf (Finnigan et al 1997).…”