A Collaborative Demonstration of Reverse Engineering Tools

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• A Collaborative Demonstration of Reverse
  Engineering Tools

Margaret-Anne Storey Susan SimKenny Wong
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Evaluating Reverse Engineering Tools

• Follow-up to the Structured Demonstrationat
  CASCON99/WCRE2000
• Peer Technologies, co-locbated, synchronous

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Tool Evaluation as a Collaborative Effort

• Collaborative Demonstration
• A Community oriented event
• Complementary and peer technologies
• Non co-located, asynchronous
• Goals
• To learn more about the complementary nature of
  our tools in the community
• To motivate more collaboration between research
  groups

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Case Study SORTIE Project

• SORTIE is an established research tool for
  modeling forest succession
• research exploration in understanding forest
  dynamics
• test environment for forest management decisions
• Legacy program
• 28 KLOC C
• Heavily reliant on Borland C libraries
• Unclear reengineering requirements
• Currently being reengineered by a student at UVic
  (Sachen Gendron) using predominantly manual
  approaches as part of an independent project

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Recruited peer and complementary tools
Parse
Analyse
Document/Visualize
Reengineer
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Participants

• Rigi tool -- University of Victoria
• cppX  -- University of Waterloo
• KBRE Group -- University of Ottawa
• Bauhaus tool -- University of Stuttgartt
• SCG Group -- University of Berne
• COLUMBUS/CAN tool -- University of Szeged,
  Hungary
• KLOCwork Suite, KLOCwork Solutions Corporation
• Graph Tool -- University of Durham
• PBS -- University of Waterloo

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Results

• Sachen Gendron read the report submitted by the
  teams to determine if the results provided by the
  tools could be helpful
• Some of the reports were useful, but not as much
  as we had hoped or expected
• Discussion and presentation held at WCRE2001 in
  Stuttgart

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Remarks

• Unusual case study(imperfect example in an
  imperfect world)
• Not as much collaboration as we hoped during the
  demonstration period technology and
  organizational issues
• But teams used each others tools and results
• Rigi compared their parser with the TkSee parser
• Columbus made GXL available
• SCG Pure provided metrics to be validated by
  other participants)
• The teams and new teams want to continue with
  this project

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SORTIE Demonstration Project

• Call for Continued Participation !!
• See http//www.csr.uvic.ca/chisel/collab/
• WCRE2001 Panel results, reports, presentations
• Discussion forum (WIKI) for current activity

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Rigi Graph (Holger Kienle/Xiaomin Wu)
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Rigi Graph (Holger Kienle/Xiaomin Wu)
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Graph Tool, Durham
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KBRE (Tim Lethbridge/Sergey Marchenko)
Clustering of classes by Types Referred
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KBRE (Tim Lethbridge/Sergey Marchenko)
Clustering of classes by Routines/Methods Called
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University of Berne group
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Code Crawler, University of Berne group
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Sachens results Current architecture
Load
Edit
Run
Display
Plant
Resource
Growth
Mortality
Recruitment
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Sachens results proposal for a new architecture