Lee Moon Kun

The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society (1994 ~ 2000), Vol. 4, No. 12, pp. 3159-3174, Dec. 1997
10.3745/KIPSTE.1997.4.12.3159,   PDF Download:

Abstract

This paper reports a research to develop a methodology and a tool for understanding of very large and complex real-time software. The methodology and the tool mostly developed by the author are called the Architecture-based Software Understanding (ARSU) and the Software Re/reverse-engineering Environment (SRE) respectively. Due to size and complexity, it is commonly very hard to understand the software during reengineering process. However the research facilitates scalable re/reverse-engineering of such real-time software based on the architecture of the software in three-dimensional perspectives:structural, functional, and behavioral views. Firstly, the structural view reveals the overall architecture, specification (outline), and the algorithm (detail) views of the software, based on hierarchically organized parent-child relationship. The basic building block of the architecture is a Software Unit (SWU), generated by user-defined criteria. The architecture facilitates navigation of the software in top-down or bottom-up way. It captures the specification and algorithm views at different levels of abstraction. It also show the functional and the behavioral information at these levels. Secondly, the functional view includes graphs of data/control flow, input/output, definition/use, variable/reference, etc. Each feature of the view contains different kind of functionality of the software. Thirdly, the behavioral view includes state diagrams, interleaved event lists, etc. This view show the dynamic properties of the software at runtime. Beside these views, there are a number of other documents: capabilities, interfaces, comments, code, etc. One of the most powerful characteristics of this approach is the capability of abstracting and exploding these dimensional information in the architecture through navigation. These capabilities establish the foundation for scalable and modular understanding of the software. This approach allows engineers to extract reusable components from the software during reengineering process.

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