Bart Du Bois

Empirical studies in reverse engineering: state of the art and future trends

Starting with the aim of modernizing legacy systems, often written in old programming languages, reverse engineering has extended its applicability to virtually every kind of software system. Moreover, the methods originally designed to recover a diagrammatic, high-level view of the target system have been extended to address several other problems faced by programmers when they need to understand and modify existing software. The authors’ position is that the next stage of development for this discipline will necessarily be based on empirical evaluation of methods. In fact, this evaluation is required to gain knowledge about the actual effects of applying a given approach, as well as to convince the end users of the positive cost–benefit trade offs. The contribution of this paper to the state of the art is a roadmap for the future research in the field, which includes: clarifying the scope of investigation, defining a reference taxonomy, and adopting a common framework for the execution of the experiments.

Refactoring: current research and future trends

In this paper we provide an detailed overview of existing research in the field of software restructuring and refactoring, from a formal as well as a practical point of view. Next, we propose an extensive list of open questions that indicate future research directions, and we provide some partial answers to these questions.

The LAN-simulation: A Research and Teaching Example for Refactoring

The notion of refactoring - transforming the source-code of an object-oriented program without changing its external behaviour - has been studied intensively within the last decade. This diversity has created a plethora of toy-examples, cases and code snippets, which make it hard to assess the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, due to this diversity, there is currently no accepted way of teaching good refactoring practices, despite the acknowledgment in the software engineering body of knowledge. Therefore, this paper presents a common example - the LAN simulation - which has been used by a number of European Universities for both research and teaching purposes.The notion of refactoring —- transforming the source-code of an object-oriented program without changing its external behaviour —- has been studied intensively within the last decade. This diversity has created a plethora of toy-examples, cases and code snippets, which make it hard to assess the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, due to this diversity, there is currently no accepted way of teaching good refactoring practices, despite the acknowledgment in the software engineering body of knowledge. Therefore, this paper presents a common example —- the LAN simulation —- which has been used by a number of European Universities for both research and teaching purposes.

Supporting Reengineering Scenarios with FETCH: an Experience Report

The exploration and analysis of large software systems is a labor-intensive activity in need of tool support. In recent years, a number of tools have been developed that provide key functionality for standard reverse engineering scenarios, such as (i) metric analysis; (ii) anti-pattern detection; (iii) dependency analysis; and (iv) visualization. However, either these tools support merely a subset of this list of scenarios, they are not made available to the research community for comparison or extension, or they impose strict restrictions on the source code. Accordingly, we observe a need for an extensible and robust open source alternative, which we present in this paper. Our main contributions are (i) a clarification of useful reverse engineering scenarios; (ii) a comparison among existing solutions; and (iii) an experience report on four recent cases illustrating the usefulness of tool support for these scenarios in an industrial setting.

SERIOUS: Software Evolution, Refactoring, Improvement of Operational and Usable Systems

Software intensive systems evolve during their lifetime, which inevitably results in degrading software quality. In order to extend the lifetime of their products, organizations must adopt a more mature – evolutionary – software development approach that pays attention to quality aspects during all phases of the product life cycle. In this paper we list the achievements and lessons learned that were obtained during the SERIOUS project, an European research project that tested state-of-the-art techniques, tools and processes on numerous case studies in varying industrial contexts. The application of evolutionary software development resulted in changes in the state-of-practice, yielding reduced total development costs and increased product lifetimes for the participating business units. more complex systems.

Accommodating Changing Requirements with EJB

Component Based Software Development promises to lighten the task of web application developers by providing a standard component architecture for building distributed object oriented business applications. Hard evidence consolidat-ing this promise has yet to be provided, especially knowing that the standard libraries of today’s programming languages offer considerable support for distribution (e.g. remote method invocations, database interfaces). Therefore, this paper compares three Java implementations of the same functionality – one using straightforward library-calls, one using a custom-made framework and one using the Enterprise Java Beans framework (EJB) – to assess the maintainability of each of the approaches. We ob-serve that EJB results in better maintainability (code is less complex and exhibits more explicit weak coupling) but that the framework version without the framework cost results in comparable numbers. Therefore, we conclude that Component Based Software Development is necessary for building websystems that will continue to survive in the context of rapidly changing requirements.

A qualitative investigation of UML modeling conventions

Analogue to the more familiar notion of coding conventions, modeling conventions attempt to ensure uniformity and prevent common modeling defects. While it has been shown that modeling conventions can decrease defect density, it is currently unclear whether this decreased defect density results in higher model quality, i.e., whether models created with modeling conventions exhibit higher fitness for purpose. In a controlled experiment with 27 master-level computer science students, we evaluated quality differences between UML analysis and design models created with and without modeling conventions. We were unable to discern significant differences w.r.t. the clarity, completeness and validity of the information the model is meant to represent. We interpret our findings as an indication that modeling conventions should guide the analyst in identifying what information to model, as well as how to model it, lest their effectiveness be limited to optimizing merely syntactic quality.