Conceptual module querying for software reengineering

Abstract

Many tools have been built to analyze source code. Most of these tools do not adequately support reengineering activities because they do not allow a software engineer to simultaneously perform queries about both the existing and the desired source structure. This paper introduces the conceptual module approach that overcomes this limitation. A conceptual module is a set of lines of source that are treated as a logical unit. We show how the approach simplifies the gathering of source information for reengineering tasks, and describe how a tool to support the approach was built as a front-end to existing source analysis tools.