ESEC/FSE'99 Workshop on Object-Oriented Reengineering
Toulouse (France), Monday September 6th, 1999
Submitted Position Papers

List of Position Papers

• Round-Trip Software Engineering Using UML: From Architecture to Design and Back

  Authors:

  Nenad Medvidovic (Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, USA)
  Alexander Egyed (Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, USA)
  David S. Rosenblum (Department of Information and Computer Science University of California, Irvine, USA)

  Abstract:

  A key promise of software architecture research is that better software systems can result from modeling their important aspects throughout development. Choosing which system aspects to model and how to evaluate them are two decisions that frame software architecture research. Part of the software architecture community, primarily from academia, has focused on analytic evaluation of architectural descriptions. Another part of the community, primarily from industry, has chosen to model a wide range of issues that arise in software development, with a family of models that span and relate the issues. One problem that neither community has adequately addressed to date is round-trip software engineering: consistently refining a high-level model of a software system into a lower-level model (forward engineering) and abstracting a low-level model into a higher-level one (reverse engineering). This paper investigates the possibility of using the Unified Modeling Language (UML), an object-oriented design language, to that end. The paper assesses UML's suitability for modeling architectural concepts and provides a framework for identifying and resolving mismatches within and across different UML views, both at the same level of abstraction and across lev-els of abstraction. Finally, the paper briefly discusses our current tool support for round-trip software engineering.

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• Understanding class hierarchies with KABA

  Authors:

  Mirko Streckenbach (Universität Passau, Germany)
  Gregor Snelting (Universität Passau, Germany)

  Abstract:

  KABA is a prototype implementation of the Snelting/Tip analysis for JAVA. KABA combines dataflow analysis, type inference and concept lattices in order to perform a fine-grained analysis of member-access patterns in a class hierarchy together with a given set of applications. KABA computes a transformed hierarchy which is guaranteed to be 1. operationally equivalent, 2. maximally factorized, 3. minimal. The new hierarchy in particular makes obvious which classes can be splitted and which cannot; which inheritance relations must be retained and which can be discarded. The paper presents several case studies on medium-sized JAVA programs.

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• Extracting Reusable Software Architectures: A Slicing-Based Approach

  Authors:

  Jianjun Zhao (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Japan)

  Abstract:

  An alternative approach to developing reusable components from scratch is to recover them from existing systems. Although numerous techniques have been proposed to recover reusable components from existing systems, most have focused on implementation code, rather than software architecture. In this paper, we apply architectural slicing to extract reusable architectures from existing architectural specifications. Architectural slicing is designed to operate on the architectural specification of a software system to provide knowledge about the high-level structure of a software system, rather than the traditional program slicing which is designed to operate on the source code of a program to provide the low-level implementation details of a program.

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• SNiFF+ Talks to Rational Rose -- Interoperability using a Common Exchange Model

  Authors:

  Sander Tichelaar (Software Composition Group, University of Berne, Switzerland)
  Serge Demeyer (Software Composition Group, University of Berne, Switzerland)

  Abstract:

  Nowadays development environments are required to be open: users want to be able to work with a combination of their preferred commercial and home-grown tools. TakeFive has opened up SNiFF+ with a so-called "Symbol Table API"; Rational has opened up the UML tool Rose via the so-called "Rose Extensibility Interface (REI)". On the other hand, efforts are underway to define standards for exchanging information between case-tools; CDIF being a notable example. This paper reports on our experience to generate UML diagrams in Rational Rose from the symbol table in SNiFF+ using a standard CDIF exchange format.

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• Object-Model Driven Abstraction-to-Code Mapping

  Authors:

  Harald Gall (Distributed Systems Group, Technical University of Vienna, Austria)
  Johannes Weidl (Distributed Systems Group, Technical University of Vienna, Austria)

  Abstract:

  In object-oriented re-architecting, we face the problem of improving the maintainability of procedural source code to facilitate software evolution. We do this by transforming the procedural code into an object-structure employing encapsulation to the legacy data structures and their related procedures. To handle the concept assignment problem, we established a stepwise abstraction-to-code mapping via different object models based on criteria such as the kind of information used in the modeling process, model granularity, and model abstraction. This mapping is object-model (and thus forward-) driven rather than source-code (or reverse-) driven and therefore enables the specific use of application and domain knowledge. For that, an object-model driven approach promises a high-level semantic class structure for an improved software evolution process. We have applied our approach to a real-world embedded software system to identify potential objects; several results from the case study are given in the paper.

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