A hybrid reverse engineering approach combining metrics and program visualisation

Author

Demeyer, Serge ; Ducasse, Stéphane ; Lanza, Michele

Author_Institution

Software Composition Group, Bern Univ., Switzerland

fYear

1999

fDate

6-8 Oct 1999

Firstpage

175

Lastpage

186

Abstract

Surprising as it may seem, many of the early adopters of the object-oriented paradigm already face a number of problems typically encountered in large-scale legacy systems. Consequently, reverse engineering techniques are relevant in an object-oriented context as well. This paper investigates a hybrid approach, combining the immediate appeal of visualisations with the scalability of metrics. We validate such a hybrid approach by showing how CodeCrawler - the experimental platform we built-allowed us to understand the program structure of and identify potential design anomalies in a public-domain software system

Keywords

computer aided software engineering; object-oriented programming; program visualisation; public domain software; reverse engineering; software metrics; CodeCrawler; design anomalies identification; hybrid reverse engineering approach; large-scale legacy systems; object-oriented programming paradigm; program structure understanding; program visualisation; public-domain software system; scalability; software metrics; Chromium; Design methodology; Displays; Ear; Humans; Large-scale systems; Rain; Reverse engineering; Software systems; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Reverse Engineering, 1999. Proceedings. Sixth Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Atlanta, GA

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0303-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WCRE.1999.806958

Filename

806958