[Theses] [Software Engineering Research Group] [Department of Computer Science] [University of British Columbia]
Conceptual Modules: Expressing Desired Structure for Software Reengineering
Elisa L. A. Baniassad
M.Sc. thesis, University of British Columbia, December 1997.
Abstract
Many tools have been built to analyze the source
code of software systems. Most of these tools do not adequately
support software reengineering activities because they do not allow a
software engineer to analyze both existing and desired software
structures.
This thesis describes the conceptual modules approach and
supporting tool that aids the engineer in the investigation and
analysis of desired structure with relation to the existing structure
of source code. This approach allows a selected subset of lines of
source to be treated as a logical unit. This subset is referred to as
a conceptual module. The lines of code that comprise a conceptual
module need not be contiguous, nor must they be related in any way in
the source. Using variable dependence and control transfer
information extracted from the source, the tool analyzes the
conceptual module's constituent lines of code to determine its
interface. Additionally, the data- or control-flow between two or
more conceptual modules can be examined as a means of eliciting the
relationships between the modules and between conceptual modules and
the source. To allow the necessary flexibility in analysis, the
functionality of the tool can be tailored through a programmatic query
language component.
The usefulness of the tool has been investigated in two different
ways. First, the tool was applied to several different reengineering
scenarios: restructuring from procedural to object-oriented program
design, re-modularizing code in an existing program with little
structure, and extracting a portion of source for reuse. For each
scenario, several existing program understanding tools were also
applied to provide a basis of comparison between existing approaches
and the conceptual modules approach. Second, the tool was
successfully applied to actual reengineering tasks by two different
groups of users. One group eliminated unnecessary parts of a system's
source to improve efficiency and to enable parallelization of a 47,000
line, 56-file software package. The other group performed analysis on
a procedural program so as to better understand how to transform the
existing source into an object-oriented version.
© Elisa L. A. Baniassad, 1997.
| URL: |
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/se/papers/1999/UBC-CS-TR-99-02.html |
| File: |
/pub/www/cs.ubc.ca/docs/labs/se/papers/1999/UBC-CS-TR-99-02.html |