Reverse Engineering and Software Visualization

Abstract:

 Modern software systems consist of tens of millions of lines of code,
 structured in thousands of files, modules, classes and functions,
 written by tens of programmers over many years. As requirements,
 programming team, programming style, and technologies change at a
 high pace, it is often the case that the original architecture of a
 large software system gets lost or corrupted during the lifetime of
 the system. Reverse engineering techniques can be used to help
 system architects recover the architecture of a given software
 system from its source code and compare this architecture with a set
 of requirements and/or quality metrics. Software visualization
 techniques complement reverse engineering techniques by enabling
 architects and developers to interactively and visually query,
 navigate and understand the huge information space targeted by
 reverse engineering techniques. In this course, we present several
 techniques and tools for reverse engineering and software
 visualization. We demonstrate our methods with concrete tools and
 applications from the reverse engineering and visual understanding
 of large C and C++ code bases, UML architectures, and CVS and
 Subversion code repositories.