scholarly journals Concerns-Based Reverse Engineering for Partial Software Architecture Visualization

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Hind Alamin M ◽  
Hany H Ammar
Keyword(s):  
Reverse Engineering ◽  
Software Architecture ◽  
Web Application ◽  
Software Evolution ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Maintenance Phase ◽  
Target System ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Multiple Stakeholders ◽  
Architectural Representation

Recently, reverse engineering (RE) is becoming one of the essential engineering trends for software evolution and maintenance. RE is used to support the process of analyzing and recapturing the design information in legacy systems or complex systems during the maintenance phase. The major problem stakeholders might face in understanding the architecture of existing software systems is that the knowledge of software architecture information is difficult to obtain because of the size of the system, and the existing architecture document often is missing or does not match the current implementation of the source code. Therefore, much more effort and time are needed from multiple stakeholders such as developers, maintainers and architects for obtaining and re-documenting and visualizing the architecture of a target system from its source code files. The current works is mainly focused on the developer viewpoint. In this paper, we present a RE methodology for visualizing architectural information for multiple stakeholders and viewpoints based on applying the RE process on specific parts of the source code. The process is driven by eliciting stakeholders’ concerns on specific architectural viewpoints to obtain and visualize architectural information related these concerns. Our contributions are three fold: 1- The RE methodology is based on the IEEE 1471 standard for architectural description and supports concerns of stakeholder including the end-user and maintainer; 2- It supports the visualization of a particular part of the target system by providing a visual model of the architectural representation which highlights the main components needed to execute specific functionality of the target system, 3- The methodology also uses architecture styles to organize the visual architecture information. We illustrate the methodology using a case study of a legacy web application system.

Identification of Extract Method Refactoring Opportunities through Analysis of Variable Declarations and Uses

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (01) ◽  
pp. 49-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehmet Kaya ◽  
James W. Fawcett
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Maintenance Phase ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Software Comprehension ◽  
Implementation Phase ◽  
Development Lifecycle

Software development is a continuous process that usually starts with analyzing the system requirements and proceeds with design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Regardless of how good an initial design was achieved, quality of source code tends to decay throughout the development process as software evolves. One of the main contributing factors to this degradation of initial quality can be considered as maintenance operations, for instance to enhance performance or other attributes of the system or to fix newly discovered bugs. For such large software systems, development process also requires reusing existing components which may have been implemented by others. Hence, a comprehensible piece of source code, e.g. one that conveys its message about what it is trying to do easily with understandable and modular implementation, significantly reduces time and effort not only for the implementation phase of the development lifecycle; but also for testing and maintenance phases. In other words, while software decay is inevitable, software comprehension plays a determining role in the total cost and effectiveness of both implementation phase and maintenance phase. Therefore, developers should strive to create software components with modular structure and clearer implementation to reduce the development cost. In this paper, we are interested in finding ways to successfully decompose long methods (those with poor initial implementation and/or decayed overtime) into smaller, more comprehensible and readable ones. This decomposition process is known as extract method refactoring and helps to reduce the overall cost of development. Most of the existing refactoring tools require users to select the code fragments that need to be extracted. We introduce a novel technique for this refactoring. This technique seeks refactoring opportunities based on variable declarations and uses confining fully extractable code regions without any user intervention. We implemented this technique as an analysis and visualization tool to help a user identify candidate code fragments to be extracted as separate methods. With this automation tool, developers do not have to manually inspect a foreign code base to select code fragments for refactoring. Through the visual representations we provide, one can observe all suggested refactoring effectively on large scale software systems and decide whether a particular refactoring should be applied. To show the effectiveness of our techniques, we also provide some case studies conducted using this tool and technique both on our own project’s source code and other open-source projects.

SUMMING UP THE PARTS

2010 ◽  
pp. 231-235
Author(s):  
Liliana María Favre
Keyword(s):  
Reverse Engineering ◽  
Programming Languages ◽  
Information Integration ◽  
Software Evolution ◽  
Engineering Industry ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Model Driven ◽  
Architectural Framework ◽  
Integration Problem ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter summarizes the main results described in this book and challenges and strategic directions in MDA reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing software systems to extract software artifacts at a higher level of abstraction. Nowadays, software and system engineering industry evolves to manage new platform technologies, design techniques and processes. Architectural framework for information integration and tool interoperation, such as MDA, had created the need to develop new analysis tools and specific techniques. MDA is not itself a technology specification but it represents an evolving plan to achieve cohesive model-driven technology specifications. The original inspiration around the definition of MDA had to do with the middleware integration problem in internet. Beyond interoperability reasons, there are other good benefits to use MDA such as to improve the productivity, process quality and maintenance costs. The outstanding ideas behind MDA are separating the specification of the system functionality from its implementation on specific platforms, managing the software evolution from abstract models to implementations increasing the degree of automation and achieving interoperability with multiple platforms, programming languages and formal languages.

scholarly journals FORMAL METHODS TO AID THE EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE

1995 ◽  
Vol 05 (01) ◽  
pp. 25-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. P. WARD ◽  
K. H. BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
Software Development ◽  
Reverse Engineering ◽  
Formal Methods ◽  
Software Evolution ◽  
Formal Method ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Legacy Systems ◽  
Program Transformations ◽  
Industrial Software

There is a vast collection of operational software systems which are vitally important to their users, yet are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, enhance, and keep up to date with rapidly changing requirements. For many of these so-called legacy systems, the option of throwing the system away and rewriting it from scratch is not economically viable. Methods are therefore urgently required which enable these systems to evolve in a controlled manner. The approach described in this paper uses formal proven program transformations, which preserve or refine the semantics of a program while changing its form. These transformations are applied to restructure and simplify the legacy systems and to extract higher-level representations. By using an appropriate sequence of transformations, the extracted representation is guaranteed to be equivalent to the code. The method is based on a formal wide spectrum language, called WSL, with an accompanying formal method. Over the last ten years we have developed a large catalog of proven transformations, together with mechanically verifiable applicability conditions. These have been applied to many software development, reverse engineering, and maintenance problems. In this paper, we focus on the results of using this approach in the reverse engineering of medium scale, industrial software, written mostly in languages such as assembler and JOVIAL. Results from both benchmark algorithms and heavily modified, geriatric software are summarized. We conclude that formal methods have an important practical role in software evolution.

ANALYZING AND IMPROVING WEB APPLICATION QUALITY USING DESIGN PATTERNS

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-116
Author(s):  
Shikha Bhatia ◽  
Mr. Harshpreet Singh
Keyword(s):  
Web Application ◽  
Design Pattern ◽  
Design Patterns ◽  
Web Applications ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Interactive Software ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Software Application ◽  
Execution Speed

With the mounting demand of web applications, a number of issues allied to its quality have came in existence. In the meadow of web applications, it is very thorny to develop high quality web applications. A design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a generally stirring problem in software design. It should be noted that design pattern is not a finished product that can be directly transformed into source code. Rather design pattern is a depiction or template that describes how to find solution of a problem that can be used in many different situations. Past research has shown that design patterns greatly improved the execution speed of a software application. Design pattern are classified as creational design patterns, structural design pattern, behavioral design pattern, etc. MVC design pattern is very productive for architecting interactive software systems and web applications. This design pattern is partition-independent, because it is expressed in terms of an interactive application running in a single address space. We will design and analyze an algorithm by using MVC approach to improve the performance of web based application. The objective of our study will be to reduce one of the major object oriented features i.e. coupling between model and view segments of web based application. The implementation for the same will be done in by using .NET framework.

scholarly journals Internal Quality Evolution of Open-Source Software Systems

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 5690
Author(s):  
Mamdouh Alenezi
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Software Evolution ◽  
Quality Metrics ◽  
Internal Quality ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Software Metric ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The Relationship

The evolution of software is necessary for the success of software systems. Studying the evolution of software and understanding it is a vocal topic of study in software engineering. One of the primary concepts of software evolution is that the internal quality of a software system declines when it evolves. In this paper, the method of evolution of the internal quality of object-oriented open-source software systems has been examined by applying a software metric approach. More specifically, we analyze how software systems evolve over versions regarding size and the relationship between size and different internal quality metrics. The results and observations of this research include: (i) there is a significant difference between different systems concerning the LOC variable (ii) there is a significant correlation between all pairwise comparisons of internal quality metrics, and (iii) the effect of complexity and inheritance on the LOC was positive and significant, while the effect of Coupling and Cohesion was not significant.

Software Evolution Rules with Condition Constrains to Support Component Type Matching Based on Bigraph

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (10) ◽  
pp. 1429-1453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao-Ze Lu ◽  
Guo-Sun Zeng ◽  
Wen-Juan Liu
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Software Development ◽  
Software Architecture ◽  
Software Evolution ◽  
Type System ◽  
Reaction System ◽  
Basic Component ◽  
Development Method ◽  
Component Type ◽  
Tourism Information

With the gradual maturity of component oriented software development method, component-based software evolution technology has become hot research in academia and industry. Although many evolution rules are designed, they rarely consider component type-mismatched problem in evolution rules. This has led to evolution rules that often run error in software evolution execution. Hence, focusing on the mismatch problem of component type in software evolution, this paper addresses various evolution rules with condition constrains to support component type matching. First, we use the bigraph theory to model the software architecture and employ bigraph term language to describe the basic component evolution operations. Second, we join type system into the term language and use the type term language to express the condition constraints on position and connection for component evolution rules. These condition constraints can guarantee the type-matched among components that participate in software evolution. Furthermore, we show that the component type-matched still kept during a number of different evolution rules are used in the whole software evolution reaction system. Finally, two cases study of evolution progress of ATM system and tourism information system are presented. Two cases illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.

scholarly journals Implementation Model of Source Code Generator

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Ivan Magdalenić ◽  
Danijel Radošević ◽  
Dragutin Kermek
Keyword(s):  
Web Services ◽  
Web Application ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Data Retrieval ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Information Discovery ◽  
Code Generator ◽  
Implementation Model ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Dynamic Generation

The on demand generation of source code and its execution is essential if computers are expected to play an active role in information discovery and retrieval. This paper presents a model of implementation of a source code generator, whose purpose is to generate source code on demand. Theimplementation of the source code generator is fully configurable and its adoption to a new application is done by changing the generator configuration and not the generator itself. The advantage of using the source code generator is rapid and automatic development of a family of application once necessary program templates and generator configuration are made. The model of implementation of the source code generator is general and implemented source code generator can be used in differentareas. We use a source code generator for dynamic generation of ontology supported Web services for data retrieval and for building of different kind of web application.

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