Biggerstaff, T. "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse". IEEE Computer, 7, 1989. pp. 36-49.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....databases, or any malicious or unintentional modification to computer systems. The IBM contact for this paper is Phil Ford, Centre for Advanced Studies, IBM Canada Ltd. Stn. 21, Dept. 894, 844 Don Mills Road, North York, Ontario M3C 1V7 1 Introduction Reverse engineering and design recovery [2,3,4,5] provide useful tools for program understanding, an important part of software maintenance of legacy systems. Such tools often mimic the front end of the compilation process and yield much useful information that a compiler acquires to generate good code but which is normally not available to ....

T. J. Biggerstaff, "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", Computer 22(7), pages 36--49, (July 1989).

....easily stand out in a way that immediately conveys nonobvious structural information to a maintainer taking responsibility for such a system. Keywords: legacy code, string matching, clone detection, program understanding, textual redundancy 1 Introduction Reverse engineering and design recovery [2,4,5] provide useful tools for program understanding, an important part of software maintenance of legacy systems. Such tools often mimic the front end of the compilation process and yield much useful information that a compiler acquires to generate good code but which is normally not available to ....

T. J. Biggerstaff, "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", Computer 22(7), pp. 36-- 49, (July 1989).

....reverse engineering and documenting C and C software systems. The source code of the target software can be analyzed and browsed at any level of abstraction using different views. Imagix4D uses 3D views to help the user to focus and 14 analyze particular aspects of the software. DESIRE [8] is a model based design recovery system that can be used for concept recognition and program understanding. It provides intelligent assistant facilities to search for instances of user defined concepts, to identify concepts that correspond to some domain model concept, and to propose a concept ....

Biggerstaff T.J., Design recovery for maintenance and reuse, IEEE Software, 22, 7, July, 1989, pp. 36--49.

....organizational knowledge acquired during the lifetime of the organization, understanding the system is a critical factor for the organizations success. A renewal process can update the legacy system and preserve the organization s investment. The reengineering techniques available in literature [Big89], Bro93] CC90] institute a reengineering process that involves the entire software system. For this reason, the software system must be frozen until execution of the process has been completed; in other words, no changes are possible during this period. In fact, if a change or a system ....

T.J. Biggerstaff, Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse,IEEE Computer, July 1989.

....and which often developed it. For the purpose of maintaining legacy systems, design recovery, as defined in [11] may be performed, requiring different sources of information, such as source code, design documentation, personal experience and general knowledge about problem and application domains [4, 27]. Central to design recov DRAFT ery is representation [36] for which different schemes have been used and described in [34] and [5] Traceability links between code and other sources of information are a sensible help to perform the combined analysis of etherogeneous information and, ....

....traceability links among various software artifacts. Analysis of informal information in the source code (comments and mnemonics for identifiers) can help to associate domain concepts with program fragments and viceversa. The importance of informal information analysis has been discussed in [4] where an approach based on structures similar to semantic networks has been proposed and the possibility of using some kind of neural networks was addressed. Comments and mnemonics have an information content with an extremely large degree of variance between systems and, often, between ....

T. Biggerstaff. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. IEEE Computer, Jul 1989.

....Microelectronics and Computer T chnology Corporation (MCC, a research consortium in e Austin, T xas) to start a research project on Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse. Their e approach is to use hypertext systems to provide different views of the abstractions of programs and structures [2]. 4.3 Development Environments Many commercial systems are able to provide information about a systems source code. DEC s V xMate package of source code tools is representative of the best tools available. V xMate a a includes: 1) Module Management System (MMS) which is similar to the Unix ....

Biggerstaff, T., "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", MCC T chnical Report e STP-378-88, November 1988.

.... about program concepts, their components and constraints [1, 2] Other approaches have investigated structural analysis and in the large re documentation of software systems, by building tools that support methods for identifying, re organizing and documenting layered subsystem hierarchies [3, 4]. Recently, some works that address the problem of high level design recovery using reverse engineering technology have been presented [5, 6] integrating in a framework architectural styles representations and a library of recognizers to extract architectural information from source code. In ....

T. Biggerstaff, "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", IEEE Computer, July 1989.

.... about program concepts, their components and constraints [22,27,40,46] Other approaches investigated structural analysis and in the large re documentation of software systems, by building tools that support methods for identifying, re organizing, and documenting layered subsystem hierarchies [7,10,23,47]. Recently, some works that address the problem of high level design recovery using reverse engineering technology have been presented [20,21,49] They integrate in a framework architectural style representations and a library of recognizers to extract architectural information from source code. ....

....(STIMP s) with the different HMODEL s corresponding to a system. The approach is language independent and was tested on unstructured programs written in various imperative languages including COBOL, C, Pascal, PL 1, Lisp, and pseudo code. Other approaches take different perspectives: the DESIRE [7] system uses informal information, such as keywords, comments, identifier names and design 23 DRAFT documents to search for abstract concepts. PROUST [26] and DUDU [4] use a top down strategy of analysis. They require the user to specify top level functional goals and check whether and how ....

T. Biggerstaff. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. IEEE Computer, Jul 1989.

....[9] is the identification of meaningful higher level abstractions beyond those obtained directly by examining [a software] system itself . According to Biggerstaff, the information so recovered would facilitate understanding what a program does, how it does it, why it does it, and so forth [4]. This recognition has led to an interest in creating higher levels of abstractions (such as requirements and design) from the source code. This is termed as reverse engineering as opposed to forward engineering the development of more concrete artifact from an abstract one, see Figure 1. The ....

T. J. Biggerstaff. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. Computer, pages 36--49, July 1989.

....is represented by a unique abstract entity. The type (and also the name ) of a component is available as an attribute of this entity. This makes our sets homogenous without any loss of generality. Interconnection relations provide the foundation for software maintenance tools, in general [7, 9, 35]. While there exist several interconnection relations (or graphs) those used by the SCTs studied in this paper can be classified into three categories, as follows. Definition: An interconnection graph whose edges are tagged with numeric values is called a weighted crossreference graph (WXG) A ....

T. J. Biggerstaff. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. Computer, pages 36--49, July 1989.

.... to focus on the area of recreating documentation from legacy code (e.g. Bigg94] Wong95] Chin96] Rich97] 11 Although tools can considerably reduce the amount of time needed to understand a migrating system, the automated understanding of a system s structure is still far from being achieved [Bigg89]. In order to recover a relevant design and documentation, much interaction from a system expert is required. Once the design and documentation have been constructed, they still have to be understood. Reusable components and redundancies have to be identified before the requirements for the target ....

T. J. Biggerstaff, 'Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse', IEEE Computer, 22(4), July 1989, pp. 36-49

....database reverse engineering, database evolution, transformational approach, process modelling, CASE tool 1. Introduction [ design recovery must reproduce all of the information required for a person to fully understand what a program does, how it does it, why it does it, BIGG,89] History and Design The history of a complex process, whatever its nature and its objective, is the trace of all the operations that have been carried out in order to complete it. This definition stands for program execution for exemple, but it is also applicable to human activities, such as ....

....imply a revision of the former decisions. The concept of history replay must be refined in order to cope with these more complex situations. Anyway, considering both applications of histories, it appears clearly that this concept must play a central role in computersupported system evolution [BIGG,89] HAI,94] Unfortunately, in the current state of development practices, all this discussion may appear as basically theoretic, and far from the reality. Indeed, most systems have been (and still are) designed without any methodological concern, and consequently without CASE support. ....

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Biggerstaff, T., J., Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse, IEEE Computer, July 1989

....Specification Figure 4: The Modified Specification 9 Figure 5: The Modified Specification after Replay Figure 6: The Final Implementation of the Modified Program 10 Because of the existence of a large existing base of software there is work on recovery of design knowledge from code. In [2] he emphasizes the existence of semantic clues in documentation and variable names that will aid in design recovery. We have adopted in our use of name correspondence this idea. Examples of work on design recovery can be found in [35, 33, 16] Our tactic language is similar to [34, 18] A richer ....

Biggerstaff, T. J. Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse. Tech. Rep. STP378 -88, MCC Corporation, November 1988.

....a number of steps. The initial phase is a static analysis process where submitted source code is examined in detail and structural information extracted. This may well be expressed in the form of software engineering artifacts, for example design rationale, module refinement, flow and control [Biggerstaff89] Then, according to the purpose of the reverse engineering process, steps are taken which either restructure or re engineer the code or produce documentary profiles on it. Sneed s effort is representative of the first subset [Sneed87] He describes a software recycling system which takes ....

....Unfortunately, little information of this form is derived by the Alchemist, except for high level scoping details. One solution to this is to adopt reverse engineering techniques in the analysis of source code to produce low level design documents or informal documentation [Wu86] Antonini87] Biggerstaff89] These could then be scanned to capture descriptive terminology concerning components and enhance classification and retrieval, in a similar manner to the system proposed by Wood [Wood87] How sensible are the components produced by these tools By following upgrade paths where reusability is ....

Biggerstaff, T.J. "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", IEEE Computer, pp.36-49 (July 1989).

....not change accordingly [Overton 1971] A successful program evolves to meet new requirements, to improve efficiency, to fix problems, or because the original approximation no longer provides an accurate model of the realworld context of the program. This thought experiment was developed by Biggerstaff [1989]. 2 Another reason is that a program typically solves a specific problem, but the model it assumes is much broader. Think, for example, of a program that computes income taxes owed. Computationally, such a program performs simple arithmetic on a few input values, but understanding the program ....

Biggerstaff, T. J. (1989), "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse," IEEE Computer, 7 22, 36-49.

....a knowledge base of events, such as statement, control, inc counter, dec counter, bubble sort, etc. An attempt is made to match the lowest level events to code statements. Then the low level events are combined to form high level events. The third approach, called the informal tokens approach [15][16][17] 18] 19] matches keywords taken from comments and identifiers to a knowledge base. Recognized low level concepts in the knowledge base are combined to form higher level concepts. Some of the knowledge based approaches use additional, structural information such as abstract syntax trees or ....

....only with loop analysis. Athough loops typically are one of the most difficult parts of a program to understand, loop analysis alone does not normally provide sufficient information upon which to base overall understanding of a program. 2.3.1.7. The DESIRE System Biggerstaff Biggerstaff [15][16][17] 18] 19] argues that a parsing oriented approach based on structural patterns of programming language features, which is the approach of all tools examined in this survey so far, is necessary but not sufficient for solving the general concept assignment problem. Parsing approaches return ....

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Biggerstaff, T.J., "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse," IEEE Computer, Volume 22, Issue 7, July 1989, pp. 36-49.

....[21] and specification matching [18] Although these tools may help a developer find individual components of interest, they do not show how these components can be used in combination. There are also tools that help a developer examine a software library in terms of architecture, style, etc. [6, 14, 26]. This may be helpful in understanding the design of the library which would facilitate reuse particularly with frameworks. However, such tools require a bottom up approach to understanding the essential components, their relationships, and collaborations. These bottom up approaches to ....

T. J. Biggerstaff. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. Computer, 22(7):36--49, 1989.

....program is first parsed into abstract syntax trees. Then each abstract syntax tree is matched to a low level concept. Higher level concepts are formed by combining low level concepts, and meeting constraints due to control flow and data dependency. The third approach is that taken by Biggerstaff [3] [4] He argues that a parsing oriented approach based on structural patterns of programming language features is necessary, but not sufficient for solving the general concept assignment problem. Parsing approaches return programming oriented concepts such as searches, sorts, numerical ....

....One of the goals of this research is to automate the identification of reusable components as much as possible, and therefore the heuristic, concept driven approach was chosen. A hybrid method of concept understanding has been employed. Primarily, an approach similar to that of Biggerstaff [3] [4] has been followed, in that primarily comments and identifiers have been used to match versus the domain base for the identification of concepts. However, there are several differences between this approach and that of Biggerstaff. First, a natural language parser is applied to header block ....

Biggerstaff, T.J.,"Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", IEEE Computer, Volume 22, Issue 7, July 1989, pp.36-49..

....A general purpose tool should depend as little as possible on application specific knowledge. In the reverse engineering community, for example, it is a topic of discussion whether pure reverse engineering tools can produce sufficiently good results. One camp, exemplified by Biggerstaff [9], Sneed and Jandrasics [44] or Buss and Henshaw [14] argues that only design recovery approaches, using outside knowledge such as design and specification documents, or an application domain specific knowledge base, allow for the (semi automatic) construction of useful abstractions. ....

Ted J. Biggerstaff. Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse. IEEE Computer, 22(7):36--49, July 1989.

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Biggerstaff, T. "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse". IEEE Computer, 7, 1989. pp. 36-49.

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T. Biggerstaff. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. IEEE Computer, Jul 1989.

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T. J. Biggerstaff, `Design recovery for maintenance and reuse', Computer, 22 (7), 36--49 (1989).

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T. Biggerstaff, "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", IEEE Computer, July 1989.

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T. Biggerstaff, "Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse", COMPUTER, July 1989, pp. 36-49.

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: T.J. BIGGERSTAFF, "Design Recovery for Maintenance and reuse", Computer, July 1989.

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