Reverse engineering a large component-based software product

2012

Nowadays a large majority of software systems are built using various technologies that in turn rely on different languages (e.g. Java, XML, SQL etc.). We call such systems heterogeneous applications (HAs). By contrast, we call software systems that are written in one language homogeneous applications. In HAs the information regarding the structure and the behaviour of the system is spread across various components and languages and the interactions between different application elements could be hidden. In this context applying existing reverse engineering and quality assurance techniques developed for homogeneous applications is not enough. These techniques have been created to measure quality or provide information about one aspect of the system and they cannot grasp the complexity of HAs. In this dissertation we present our approach to support the analysis and evolution of HAs based on: (1) a unified first-class description of HAs and, (2) a meta-model that reifies the concept of horizontal and vertical dependencies between application elements at different levels of abstraction. We implemented our approach in two tools, MooseEE and Carrack. The first is an extension of the Moose platform for software and data analysis and contains our unified meta-model for HAs. The latter is an engine to infer derived dependencies that can support the analysis of associations among the heterogeneous elements composing HA. We validate our approach and tools by case studies on industrial and open-source JEAs which demonstrate how we can handle the complexity of such applications and how we can solve problems deriving from their heterogeneous nature.

Automated Software Engineering, 1999

The paper presents a case study in the development of software modularisation tools. The tools are produced by using a system for developing code analysers that uses a database to store both a no-loss fine-grained intermediate representation and the analyses' results. The analysers are automatically generated from a high-level specification of the desired analyses expressed in a domain-oriented language. We use a program intermediate representation, called F( p), as the user-visible data base conceptual model. Analysers are specified in a declarative language, called F( p) − , which allows the specification of an analysis in the form of a traversal of an algebraic expression, with accesses to, and stores of, the database information the algebraic expression indexes. A foreign language interface allows the analysers to be embedded into C programs. This is useful, for example, to implement the user interface of an analyser or to facilitate interoperation of the generated analysers with pre-existing tools.

Proceedings of the …, 2003

Software reuse is the process of implementing or updating software systems using existing software assets, resulting in a software quality increase, productivity and reducing time to market. One way to achieve reuse is through software reengineering. This papers presents Orion-RE, a Component-Based Software Reengineering Environment that uses software reengineering and component-based development techniques to rebuilt legacy systems, reusing their available documentation and knowledge embedded in the code. Orion-RE integrates several tools: a software transformation system, modeling/development tools, a software artifacts repository, and a middleware platform. A software process model drives the environment usage through the reverse engineering, to recover the system design, and forward engineering, where the system is rebuilt using modern technologies, such as design patterns, frameworks, CBD principles and middleware.

2007

In order to reduce costs, to minimize risks, to anticipate deadlines and to optimize resources of projects of new products it must, whenever possible, to reuse artifacts of existing similar products. These artifacts must be of easy adaptation to meet the requirements of the new products. This paper proposes the use of mining of generic software components from embedded legacy systems to collect and to document the knowledge contained in such systems, to achieve their revitalization and to produce a core of reusable assets to support the fast development of similar products. Software Product Line techniques are used for domain modeling and components design. A case study for POS (Point of Sale) terminals domain is presented. Resumo. Para reduzir custos, minimizar riscos, antecipar prazos e otimizar recursos de projetos de novos produtos deve-se, sempre que possível, reutilizar artefatos de produtos similares existentes. Esses artefatos devem ser de fácil adaptação para satisfazerem aos requisitos dos novos produtos. Este trabalho propõe o uso de mineração de componentes genéricos de software a partir de sistemas embutidos legados, para reunir e documentar os conhecimentos contidos nesses sistemas, efetuar suas revitalizações e produzir um núcleo de ativos reutilizáveis para apoiar o rápido desenvolvimento de produtos similares.

2000

Extremely large software systems which have been developed and maintained by many di erent people are termed legacy systems. These legacy systems were traditionally developed using methods such as structured analysis and design, or even individual programming techniques and styles. Over time, maintenance has changed the original program structure and speci cations. However, usually the speci cations have not been maintained, and the current design and program understanding is lost. Maintenance of these systems becomes so costly, that they become candidate for reengineering. Reverse engineering of legacy systems aims at discovering design and speci cation of existing software programs. The recovered designs are then forward engineered to improved systems. This di cult task can be assisted by CASE tools, but still requires human expertise and domain knowledge. With a technology shift from structured to object-oriented software construction, an additional problem arises i.e. transforming the structured legacy system to an object-oriented system. We outline the current state of CASE tools, followed by research directions. Further, we indicate that a two staged approach may be advantageous, where self-contained subsystems can be abstracted for design recovery and object discovery.

Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, 1995

With the growing awareness of the importance of software maintenance has come a re-evaluation of software maintenance tools. Such tools range from source code analysers to semi-intelligent tools which seek to reconstruct system designs and specification documents from source code. However, it is clear that relying solely upon source code as a basis for reverse engineering has many problems. These problems include poor abstraction which leads to over detailed specification models and the inability to link other parts of a software system, such as documentation and user expertise, to the underlying code. This paper describes the work of the Esprit DOCKET project which has developed a prototype environment to support the development of a system model linking user-oriented, business aspects of a system, to operational code using a variety of knowledge source inputs: code, documents and user expertise. The aim is to provide a coherent model to form the basis for system understanding and to support the software change and evolution process.

2010 14th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, 2010

Legacy applications are still widely spread. If a need to change deployment or update its functionality arises, it becomes difficult to estimate the performance impact of such modifications due to absence of corresponding models. In this paper, we present an extendable integrated environment based on Eclipse developed in the scope of the Q-ImPrESS project for reverse engineering of legacy applications (in C/C++/Java). The Q-ImPrESS project aims at modeling quality attributes at an architectural level and allows for choosing the most suitable variant for implementation of a desired modification. The main contributions of the project include i) a high integration of all steps of the entire process into a single tool, a beta version of which has been already successfully tested on a case study, ii) integration of multiple research approaches to performance modeling, and iii) an extendable underlying meta-model for different quality dimensions.

1993

Software engineering research has focuse d mainly on software construction and has neglected software maintenance and evolution . Proposed is a shift in research from synthesi s to analysis . Reverse engineering is introduce d as a possible solution to program understanding and software analysis . Presented is reverse engineering technology developed as part of th e Rigi project . The Rigi approach involves th e identification of software artifacts in the subject system and the aggregation of these artifacts t o form more abstract architectural models . Reported are some analyses on the source code of SQL/DS, performed by the authors while visiting the Program Understanding project at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto .

Journal of Object Technology, 2009

Due to the constant change in technology, lack of standardization, difficulties of changes and absence of distributed architecture, the business value of legacy systems have become weaker. We cannot undermine the importance of legacy systems because some of their functions are too valuable to be discarded and too expensive to reproduce. The software industry and researchers have recently paid more

Instability is the nature of any application. An Application may strive for and helps a business or company for some time (may be 10 or 15 years), during that time it has been corrected, adapted and enhanced many times. But every time a change is made into the application, unexpected and serious side effects occur. Yet the application must continue to evolve. Unmaintainable software is not a new problem. In the following sections, we are going to analyze the Software Re-engineering and Reverse-engineering processes and how they help any application to maintain the Quality standards.