Evaluation of a framework for reverse engineering tool construction

This paper describes an experiment of rapidly constructing reverse engineering tools from predefined components/tools. We perform two ways of construction. The first uses ad-hoc composition. The second exploits a framework design to support the customization of reverse engineering tools. We evaluate the quality of the assembled tools and their assembling time for each approach. For this, we describe in this paper briefly our framework, the metrics chosen for quality measurement based on the GQM approach, the experiment itself and our results. The paper gives empirical evidence that framework customization, here using the VizzAnalyzer framework, is superior to ad-hoc composition.