Composing Re-engineering Tools Using Standard Data Exchange Formats

Student: Adam Dwight

Supervisor: Mr. Ian Peake

Category: Software Engineering Thesis Project

Software reengineering examines current and legacy information systems and applications and allows us to understand existing code, transform legacy applications, and extend and maintain large code bases cost-effectively. A variety of software reengineering tools have been developed that extract, manipulate and display facts about software systems. These tools assist the software reengineering process by increasing our total understanding of the software system.

This research is concerned with the problem of information exchange between software reengineering tools. The key question investigated by this research is: Can software reengineering tools be composed from existing tools using a standard exchange format? The graph exchange language (GXL) has been adopted as the standard exchange format for the software reengineering community. We propose to assess the capability of the GXL by composing a reengineering tool that produces generic java (GJ) schema and instance data in GXL, which can then be visualised and manipulated in the Rigi reverse engineering tool.

This research tests the expressive power of the GXL, and provides evidence of its strength and suitability as a standard format. The research also examines connectivity and interoperability issues that need to be further addressed by the reengineering community.

Poster Presentation (PDF)

Thesis Document (PDF)