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Shimba is a reverse engineering environment to support the understanding of Java software systems. Shimba integrates the Rigi and SCED tools to analyze and visualize the static and dynamic aspects of a subject system. The static software artifacts and their dependencies are extracted from Java byte code and viewed as directed graphs using the Rigi reverse engineering environment. The run‐time information is generated by running the target software under a customized SDK debugger. The generated information is viewed as sequence diagrams using the SCED tool. In SCED, statechart diagrams can be synthesized automatically from sequence diagrams, allowing the user to investigate the overall run‐time behavior of objects in the target system. Shimba provides facilities to manage the different diagrams and to trace artifacts and relations across views. In Shimba, SCED sequence diagrams are used to slice the static dependency graphs produced by Rigi. In turn, Rigi graphs are used to guide the generation of SCED sequence diagrams and to raise their level of abstraction. We show how the information exchange among the views enables goal‐driven reverse engineering tasks and aids the overall understanding of the target software system. The FUJABA software system serves as a case study to illustrate and validate the Shimba reverse engineering environment. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The automatic synthesis of state machines describing the behaviour of a class of objects in object‐oriented software modelling is studied. It is shown that the synthesis can be carried out on the basis of trace diagrams giving possible sequences of events during the execution of the system. An algorithm originally developed for the automatic construction of programs on the basis of their execution traces is applied to the problem, and an experimental state machine synthesizer is implemented. It is demonstrated that such a synthesizer is a highly useful component in a practical object‐oriented CASE system.

This thesis experiments with a novel approach to applying genetic algorithms in software architecture design by giving the structure of an architecture at a highly abstract level.Previously in the literature, genetic algorithms are used only to improve existing architectures. The structure and evaluation of software architectures and the principles of meta-heuristic search algorithms are introduced to give a basis to understand the implementation. Current research in the field of search-based software engineering is explored to give a perspective to the implementation presented in this thesis. The chosen genetic construction of software architectures is based on a model which contains information of a set of responsibilities and dependencies between them. An implementation using this model is presented, as well as test results achieved from a case study made on a sketch of an electronic home control system. The test results show that quality results can be achieved using the selected approach and that the presented implementation is a good starting point for future research.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides various diagram types for describing a system from different perspectives or abstraction levels. Hence, UML diagrams describing the same system are dependent and strongly overlapping. In this paper we study how this can be exploited for specifying transformation operations between different diagram types. We discuss various general approaches and viewpoints of model transformations in UML. The source and target diagram types for useful transformations are analyzed and given categories. The potentially most interesting transformation operations are discussed in detail. It is concluded that the transformation operations can automate a substantial part of both forward and reverse engineering. These operations can be used, for example, for model checking, merging, slicing, and synthesis.

0 7 4 0 -7 4 5 9 / 1 4 / $ 3 1 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 4 I E E E J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 4 | // Architecture evaluation is an important activity in the software engineering life cycle, but unfortunately, it isn't regularly practiced in industry. Decision-centric architecture reviews uncover and evaluate the rationale behind the most important architecture decisions.Experiences in large industrial projects have shown that full-scale DCAR evaluations, including reporting, can be conducted in fewer than five person-days while still producing satisfying results for stakeholders. //

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