A reverse engineering environment based on spatial and visual software interconnection models

TLDR

Reverse engineering extracts system abstractions and design information from existing software, enabling development, maintenance, re‑engineering, or reuse by identifying artifacts and aggregating them into higher‑level representations. This paper introduces a reverse engineering environment that leverages spatial and visual information from graphical software representations to build a software interconnection model. The environment displays and manipulates these representations with an interactive graph editor, using spatial data to construct subsystem structures and illustrate how a software system is organized. Coexisting spatial and visual representations are essential for fully understanding the generated data and significantly improve subsequent analysis, processing, and decision‑making.

Abstract

Reverse engineering is the process of extracting system abstractions and design information out of existing software systems. This information can then be used for subsequent development, maintenance, re-engineering, or reuse purposes. This process involves the identification of software artifacts in a particular subject system, and the aggregation of these artifacts to form more abstract system representations. This paper describes a reverse engineering environment which uses the spatial and visual information inherent in graphical representations of software systems to form the basis of a software interconnection model. This information is displayed and manipulated by the reverse engineer using an interactive graph editor to build subsystem structures out of software building blocks. The spatial component constitutes information about how a software structure looks. The coexistence of these two representations is critical to the comprehensive appreciation of the generated data, and greatly benefits subsequent analysis, processing, and decision-making.