Authors:
Philippe Dugerdil
and
Sebastien Jossi
Affiliation:
HEG-Univ. of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Keyword(s):
Reverse-engineering, software process, software clustering, software reengineering, program comprehension, industrial experience.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Health Engineering and Technology Applications
;
Neurocomputing
;
Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics
;
Reverse Engineering
Abstract:
Legacy software system reverse engineering has been a hot topic for more than a decade. One of the key problems is to recover the architecture of the system i.e. its components and the communications between them. Generally, the code alone does not provide much clue on the structure of the system. To recover this architecture, we proposed to use the artefacts and activities of the Unified Process to guide the search. In our approach we first recover the high-level specification of the program. Then we instrument the code and “run” the use-cases. Next we analyse the execution trace and rebuild the run-time architecture of the program. This is done by clustering the modules based on the supported use-case and their roles in the software. In this paper we present an industrial validation of this reverse-engineering process. First we give a summary of our methodology. Then we show a step-by-step application of this technique to real-world business software and the result we obtained. Fin
ally we present the workflow of the tools we used and implemented to perform this experiment. We conclude by giving the future directions of this research.
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