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Object-oriented legacy systems are hard to maintain because they are hard to understand. One of the main understanding problems is revealed by the so-called "yo-yo effect" that appears when a developer or maintainer wants to track a polymorphic method call. At least part of this understanding problem is due to the dual nature of the inheritance relation i.e., the fact that it can he used...
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A large body of empirical work in the software comprehension area has focused on the cognitive processes that programmers undertake. However, as yet, little work exists on developing and assessing an encompassing framework within which one can compare comprehension studies with one another. Several authors have proposed that Bloom's taxonomy could provide such a framework and a lexical-analysis schema...
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When reusing an existing software component, the software developer needs to understand the functionality and possible extension points of the component, as well as constraints and rules to be taken into account when using it. In addition to structural rules, the software component may imply interaction rules that must be followed in application development. In this paper we discuss behavioral profiles,...
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In this paper, we present an approach that examines the evolution of code stored in source control repositories. The technique identifies change clusters, which can help managers to classify different code change activities as either software maintenance or a new development. Furthermore, identifying the variations in change clusters over time exposes trends in the development of a software system...
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The presence of traceability links between software artefacts is very important to achieve high comprehensibility and maintainability. This is confirmed by several researches and tools aiming at support traceability link maintenance and recovery. We propose to use traceability information combined with Information Retrieval techniques within an Eclipse plug-in to show the software engineer the similarity...
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Java decompilers convert Java class files to Java source. Java class files may be created by a number of different tools including standard Java compilers, compilers for other languages such as AspectJ, or other tools such as optimizers or obfuscators. There are two kinds of Java decompilers, Javac-specific decompilers that assume that the class file was created by a standard Javac compiler and tool-independent...
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Software systems are often written in more than one programming language. During development, programmers need to understand not only the dependencies among code in a particular language, but dependencies that span languages. In this paper, we focus on the problem of scripting languages (such as Perl) and their extension mechanisms to calling functions with a C interface. Our general approach involves...
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Applying information retrieval (IR) techniques to retrieve all correct links between software artefacts is in general impractical, as usually this means producing a high effort for discarding too many false positives. We show that the only way to recover traceability links using IR methods is to identify an "optimal" threshold that achieves an acceptable balance between traced links and...
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The migration to Web services has the potential of providing significant value to keeping legacy systems and components operational in a networked environment, a number of critical issues still need to be addressed. These issues can be classified in three categories; a) program comprehension and analysis issues; b) legacy system migration issues and; c) technology and standards issues. This paper...
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Alborz is a multi-view, interactive, and wizard-based software architecture reconstruction and evaluation toolkit that takes advantage of the Eclipse plug-in technology to provide feature extensibility, and uses GXL format to interoperate with other reverse engineering tools. The current version of Alborz toolkit supports static and dynamic views of a software system. For the static view, the toolkit...
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INFORM is a framework that provides J2EE application developers with an indication of how their code will perform whilst they are writing it. At present, software developers, especially those who are new to a development team, have little or no knowledge of how their changes to existing code impacts the response times of an application. For example, if a developer inappropriately utilises a high performance...
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Program componentization has been proved to be an effective way to increase the speed and cost-effectiveness of reusing, maintaining, and understanding existing software systems. JComp is a componentization framework that supports semi-automatically extracting reusable components from an existing Java system and automatically transforming the existing system into a component-based system. Based on...
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Code obfuscation makes it harder for a security analyst to understand the malicious payload of a program. In most cases an analyst needs to study the program at the machine code level, with little or no extra information available, apart from his experience. An unexperienced analyst is confronted with a steep learning curve, as understanding unobfuscated machine code already requires some skills....
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JIRiSS (information retrieval based software search for Java) is a software exploration tool that uses an indexing engine based on an information retrieval method. JIRiSS is implemented as a plug-in for Eclipse and it allows the user to search Java source code for the implementation of concepts formulated as natural language queries. The results of the query are presented as a ranked list of software...
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Several approaches to program comprehension have been proposed along the years, ranging from fact extraction to sophisticated visualization tools. In order to effectively assess the benefits of each approach, or to properly compare different techniques, it is necessary to carry out a proper, well-defined experimentation. This work session aims to discuss the main issues in preparing experimental settings...
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Fluid documents enable the interactive incorporation of related material into a primary document. Visual cues within primary material indicate that related content is available and user interaction reveals related content in context. Fluid documents reduce the need for explicit navigation, maintain context when considering related material and support synthesization of disjoint yet related information...
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Concept assignment approaches assist software engineers to comprehend software by localising problem domain concepts to source code elements. This paper presents an implementation of a concept assignment approach we call cognitive assignment which combines cognitive mapping of expert software engineers and Bayesian classification to help engineers tasked with understanding unfamiliar systems to localise...
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Large software systems have a rich development history. Mining certain aspects of this rich history can reveal interesting insights into the system and its structure. Previous approaches to visualize the evolution of software systems provide static views. These static views often do not fully capture the dynamic nature of evolution. We introduce the evolution storyboard, a visualization which provides...
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Program comprehension of unfamiliar software is a daunting task and existing comprehension environments, although helping significantly, do not fully alleviate the information overload involved. The visual medium has been well-explored in aiding software engineers understanding of source code and other artifacts concerned with maintaining existing software systems, but the use of non-visual representations,...
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The paper recasts the problem of feature location in source code as a decision-making problem in the presence of uncertainty. The main contribution consists in the combination of two existing techniques for feature location in source code. Both techniques provide a set of ranked facts from the software, as result to the feature identification problem. One of the techniques is based on a scenario based...
