Model-Driven Reverse Engineering of Open Source Systems

Open source software systems have poor or inexistent documentation and contributors are often scattered or missing. The reuse-based composition and maintenance of open source software systems therefore implies that program comprehension becomes a critical activity if all the embedded behavior is to be preserved. Program comprehension has traditionally been addressed by reverse engineering techniques which retrieve system design models such as class diagrams. These abstract representations provide a key artifact during migration or evolution. However, this method may retrieve large complex class diagrams which do not ensure a suitable program comprehension. This chapter attempts to improve program comprehension by providing a model-driven reverse engineering technique with which to obtain business processes models that can be used in combination with system design models such as class diagrams. The advantage of this approach is that business processes provide a simple system viewpoint at a higher abstraction level and filter out particular technical details related to source code. The technique is fully developed and tool-supported within an R&D project about global software development in which collaborate two universities and five companies. The automation of the approach facilitates its validation and transference through an industrial case study involving two open source systems.