Abstract
Reverse engineering creates primary models of software systems, representing their program elements and the relationships between them. According to the programming language or paradigm, these program elements are functions, variables, classes, methods, etc. The primary models are then used for different analysis purposes such as: impact analysis, modularization analysis, refactoring decisions, architectural reconstruction. Particularities of the programming language or paradigm do not affect the essence of these higher-level analysis tasks. Thus, having a unitary way of modeling program elements and their relationships is essential for the reuse and integration of higher-level analysis tools.
This work proposes a meta-model which provides a unitary way of describing static relationships between program elements. It defines a set of abstract concepts that can be mapped to program elements of both the object-oriented as well as the procedural programming paradigms. The proposed meta-model is validated by the implementation of model extraction tools from programs written in Java, C# (CIL) and ANSI C. The utility of the proposed meta-model has been shown by a number of different analysis applications that use it successfully.
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Şora, I. (2013). Unified Modeling of Static Relationships between Program Elements. In: Maciaszek, L.A., Filipe, J. (eds) Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. ENASE 2012. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 410. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45422-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45422-6_7
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