Software re-engineering using hierarchical-client-server paradigm (HCS) and BUBBLES

A software re-engineering method based on the hierarchical-client server (HCS) paradigm is presented. The re-engineering method consists of extracting cross-reference relations and transforming the data into an hierarchical set of diagrams that represent the software architecture. These diagrams provide a documentation skeleton, and may be analyzed with the BUBBLES computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool to reveal valuable information that encourages software re-use and helps software maintenance. This HCS paradigm and BUBBLES were used for re-engineering of several software systems of various sizes, and proved to be very useful for reducing the budget and schedule, and improving the quality. The author shows an example of a subsystem that was analyzed in that framework, and presents the properties and patterns that were revealed by this analysis