Enriching Reverse Engineering with Feature Analysis

Features are abstractions of a software software system encapsulating knowledge of its problem domain, denoting units of system behavior. To exploit this inherent domain knowledge of features to analyze object-oriented software systems we explicitly model features, their relationships to source artefacts, and their relationships to each other. The contribution of this work is twofold: on the one hand: (1) we enrich reverse engineering analysis of object-oriented systems with semantic knowledge of features, and (2) we introduce new techniques treating features as the primary entities of software systemanalysis. We define Dynamix, a meta-model for expressing feature entities in the context of a structural meta-model of source code entities. Using case studies, we demonstrate how our feature-centric re- verse engineering techniques, based on Dynamix, exploit feature knowledge to establish traceability between the problem and solution domains throughout the life-cycle of a system.

Autorentext

Orla Greevy, PhD in Computer Science, University of Berne,(2007), Bachelors 1984 and Masters 1996, Trinity College Dublin. Her career spans industryand research, focussing on software comprehension, dynamic analysis andpublished research papers. She currently works for Sw-Eng GmbH, a consultancy firmwhich she founded in 1998.