13402065
JRefleX: towards supporting small student software teams
The success of a software development project depends on the technical competency of the development team, the quality of the tools they use, and the project-management decisions they make during the software lifecycle. Instructors of software-engineering courses that involve small project teams are often overwhelmed with the task of monitoring the progress of multiple teams. Without adequate monitoring and advice on best practices, problems in the team's process or the developed product may go unnoticed until it is too late to be easily fixed. This paper introduces the JRefleX environment, with components built upon Eclipse, to support the education of small software teams.
207701477
Reverse engineering: a roadmap
By the early 1990s the need for reengineering legacy systems was already acute, but recently the demand has increased significantly with the shift toward web-based user interfaces. The demand by all business sectors to adapt their information systems to the Web has created a tremendous need for methods, tools, and infrastructures to evolve and exploit existing applications efficiently and cost-effectively. Reverse engineering has been heralded as one of the most promising technologies to combat this legacy systems problem. This paper presents a roadmap for reverse engineering research for the first decade of the new millennium, building on the program comprehension theories of the 1980s and the reverse engineering technology of the 1990s.
13347465
On evaluating the layout of UML class diagrams for program comprehension
UML class diagrams are helpful for understanding the structure of a software system. Algorithms and tools have been developed to generate UML class diagrams automatically for program understanding purposes. However, many tools often ignore perceptual factors in the layout of these diagrams. Therefore, users still have to spend much time and effort rearranging boxes and lines to make the diagram understandable. This paper presents key criteria and guidelines for the effective layout of UML class diagrams from the perspective of perceptual theories. Two UML tools have been analyzed and evaluated to illustrate how the criteria can be applied to improve the readability of class diagrams.
18962931
Analyzing xfig using the Rigi tool suite
An experiment is conducted on how well expert users of program comprehension tools are able to perform specific program understanding and maintenance tasks on the xfig drawing program using these tools. The paper reports on the experiences of the users of the Rigi reverse engineering tool suite. Rigi is an interactive, visual tool designed to help developers better understand and redocument their software. Rigi includes parsers to read the source code of the subject software and produce a graph of extracted artifacts such as procedures, variables, calls, and data accesses. To manage the complexity of the graph, an editor allows the software engineer to automatically or manually collapse related artifacts into subsystems. These subsystems typically represent concepts such as abstract data types or personnel assignments. The created hierarchy can be navigated, analyzed, and presented using various automatic or user-guided graphical layouts.
12666551
Fused data-centric visualizations for software evolution environments
During software evolution, several different facets of the system need to be related to one another at multiple levels of abstraction. Current software evolution tools have limited capabilities for effectively visualizing and evolving multiple system facets in an integrated manner. Many tools provide methods for tracking and relating different levels of abstraction within a single facet. However, it is less well understood how to represent and understand relationships between and among different abstraction hierarchies, i.e. for inter-hierarchy relations. Often, these are represented and explored independently, making them difficult to relate to one another. As a result, engineers are likely to have difficulty understanding how the various facets of a system relate and interact. We describe preliminary results of a collaborative research project between industry and academia to enhance the inter-hierarchy visualization capabilities of an existing software evolution environment called "KLOCwork Suite". Specifically, we describe our efforts to add a "fused" visualization based on story board diagrams. This visualization integrates - or "fuses" - facets of architecture, behavior and data. We describe how these diagrams bridge currently isolated visualizations of system information, and argue how they can help drive architecture excavation tasks.
5167918
Extracting Facts from Perl Code
Scripting languages are popular in software development, for rapid prototyping and flexible software integration. Still, there has been relatively more effort spent on reverse engineering for traditional languages, like C, C++, and Java. Certain scripting languages, such as Perl, are notoriously difficult to understand. Consequently, reverse engineering for Perl code is very much needed. Nevertheless, the subtle constructs of the language make it challenging to develop a reliable fact extractor from scratch. Thus, we use the Perl interpreter implementation itself, since it is authoritative for the meaning of some Perl construct. An extractor component is inserted into the interpreter, to consult the internal data structures, and generate the desired facts in a static extraction technique. The facts conform to a schema that is represented in GXL and EMF XML-based formats. A case study evaluated how the extractor processed all the Perl modules provided with the Perl distribution source code
8164588
Reconstruction and Motion Estimation from Apparent Contours under Circular Motion
In thispaperweaddresstheproblemof recoveringstructureandmotionfrom thecontoursof a smooth-curvedsurface.A novel andsimplertechniquefor computingthestructureof anobjectfrom its profilesis introduced.Experimentswith real datashow encouragingresults,which are comparableto thoseobtainedfrom muchmore sophisticatedtechniques.Furthermore,a new methodfor motion estimationfrom sequencesof profilesis proposed. Preliminaryresultsdemonstratethefeasibilityof thealgorithm.
6619418
The Software Bookshelf
Legacy software systems are typically complex, geriatric, and difficult to change, having evolved over decades and having passed through many developers. Nevertheless, these systems are mature, heavily used, and constitute massive corporate assets. Migrating such systems to modern platforms is a significant challenge due to the loss of information over time. As a result, we embarked on a research project to design and implement an environment to support software migration. In particular, we focused on migrating legacy PL/I source code to C++, with an initial phase of looking at redocumentation strategies. Recent technologies such as reverse engineering tools and World Wide Web standards now make it possible to build tools that greatly simplify the process of redocumenting a legacy software system. In this paper we introduce the concept of a software bookshelf as a means to capture, organize, and manage information about a legacy software system. We distinguish three roles directly involved in the construction, population, and use of such a bookshelf: the builder, the librarian, and the patron. From these perspectives, we describe requirements for the bookshelf, as well as a generic architecture and a prototype implementation. We also discuss various parsing and analysis tools that were developed and integrated to assist in the recovery of useful information about a legacy system. In addition, we illustrate how a software bookshelf is populated with the information of a given software project and how the bookshelf can be used in a program-understanding scenario. Reported results are based on a pilot project that developed a prototype bookshelf for a software system consisting of approximately 300K lines of code written in a PL/I dialect.
12876616
A Design of Temporal Event Extraction from Chinese Financial News
This paper presents an information system for Chinese Information Extraction from Financial news (CHIEF). The ultimate target of the system is to extract information concerning the occurrence time and places of the financial activities in the different companies from a local Hong Kong newspaper, namely (Tao Kung Pao). To facilitate event extraction purpose, two groups of templates were defined, i.e. the company related and company restructuring templates. They are used to select the desired information for each type of financial activities, such as (bankruptcy) or (merge). Each specific event is then represented using a frame-based knowledge structure. Two types of slots are embedded in each frame: they are the activity- and time-related slots. Based on these slots, multiple activities are interconnected according to their entity relations, temporal relations or the deduced relations. Effectively, CHIEF is a question-answering system designed for handling the company related queries, event based queries, temporal queries and complex queries in a finance domain.
6330846
Component-based software engineering: technologies, development frameworks, and quality assurance schemes
Component-based software development approach is based on the idea to develop software systems by selecting appropriate off-the-shelf components and then to assemble them with a well-defined software architecture. Because the new software development paradigm is very different from the traditional approach, quality assurance (QA) for component-based software development is a new topic in the software engineering community. In this paper, we survey current component-based software technologies, describe their advantages and disadvantages, and discuss the features they inherit. We also address QA issues for component-based software. As a major contribution, we propose a QA model for component-based software which covers component requirement analysis, component development, component certification, component customization, and system architecture design, integration, testing and maintenance.
7779937
Fundamental Properties of the Core Matching Functions for Information Retrieval
Traditional benchmarking methods for information retrieval (IR) are based on experimental performance evaluation. Although the metrics precision and recall can measure the performance of a system, it cannot assess the functionality of the underlying model. Recently, a theory of “aboutness” has been studied and used for reasoning about functional of IR models. Latest research shows the functionality of an IR model is largely determined by its retrieval mechanism, i.e., the matching function; in particular, containment and overlapping (either with or without a threshold value) are core IR matching functions. The objective of this paper is to model the containment and overlapping matching functions within an aboutness-based framework, reason and analyze the inherent functionality of them from an abstract and theoretical viewpoint. Separate aboutness relations for containment, pureoverlapping (i.e. without threshold) and threshold-overlapping are defined, and the sets of properties supported by them are derived and analyzed respectively. These three relations can be used to explain the functionality supported by an IR system and their effects to its performance; and moreover, they provide the design guidelines for new IR systems.