Building Reverse Engineering Tools with Software Components: Ten Lessons Learned

Abstract

My dissertation explores a new approach to construct tools in the domain of reverse engineering. The approach leverages already available (off-the-shelf) components and products, assembling and customizing them programmatically. This approach can be characterized as componentbased tool-building (CBTD). While many academic tools follow CBTD-presumable with the goal to save time and effort-, this approach is still pursued in an ad hoc manner. In my dissertation I strive to advance the current state of CBTD towards a discipline that is more predictable and formal. This is achieved with two major research contributions. The first contribution states the necessary requirements for a tool-building process in academia in the domain of reverse engineering. These process requirements have been identified with a literature survey of the current tool-building approaches that exist in academia as well as the author's first-hand experience. The second contribution is a dedicated process framework for CBTD that meets the process requirements identified by the first contribution. The process framework is a first step towards formalizing CBTD with the goal to help researchers to build tools in a more predictable and effective manner.

Building reverse engineering tools with software components: Towards a dedicated development process for academia

“…Other approaches should be pursued as well: more documented experiences and case studies are needed; and more disciplined approaches for tool construction have to be proposed, tried out, and evaluated. For example, I have distilled my tool building experiences into lessons learned (also described in my dissertation) [9]. I hope that other researchers will more actively discuss and publish their experiences as well.…”

“…I have gained experience in the building of reverse engineering tools with the evolution and maintenance of the Rigi (University of Victoria) and Bauhaus (University of Stuttgart) tools as well as the construction of several component-based reverse engineering and visualization tools (implemented on top of Visio, GoLive, Lotus Notes, and others) [8]. In the following, I briefly describe the identified requirements and important related work.…”

“…Many researchers choose to implement a (prototype) tool to demonstrate the feasibility of their proposed technique, and to conduct user studies that show the tool's effectiveness. My dissertation [8] explores the current state of tool building in the reverse engineering domain with the aim to improve upon the current practice. This topic is worthwhile to address because even though tool building is a popular technique to validate research, it is neither simple nor cheap to accomplish.…”

An Improved Repository Structure to Identify, Select and Integrate Components in Component-based Development

“…A model is proposed to assure quality [5]. The study explores the current state of tool building in the reverse engineering domain intending to improve upon the practice to a predictable format [6]. The symptoms of code smells are poor design and implementation choices [7].…”

Towards a Process for Developing Maintenance Tools in Academia

“…We also draw from informal discussions with other researchers in the maintenance domain, and from our own experiences of developing software visualization and reverse engineering tools. Our own experiences include the development and maintenance of the Rigi and Bauhaus tools as well as the tools constructed in the context of the Adoption-Centric Software Engineering (ACSE) project [19].…”