Ontological Reengineering for Reuse

This paper presents the concept of Ontological Reengineering as the process of retrieving and transforming a conceptual model of an existing and implemented ontology into a new, more correct and more complete conceptual model which is reimplemented. Three activities have been identified in this process: reverse engineering, restructuring and forward engineering. The aim of Reverse Engineering is to output a possible conceptual model on the basis of the code in which the ontology is implemented. The goal of Restructuring is to reorganize this initial conceptual model into a new conceptual model, which is built bearing in mind the use of the restructured ontology by the ontology/application that reuses it. Finally, the objective of Forward Engineering is output a new implementation of the ontology. The paper also discusses how the ontological reengineering process has been applied to the Standard-Units ontology [18], which is included in a Chemical-Elements [12] ontology. These two ontologies will be included in a Monatomic-Ions and Environmental-Pollutants ontologies

Evaluating and Improving Reverse Engineering Tools

Developers tend to leave some important steps and actions (e.g. properly designing the system's architecture, code review and testing) out of the software development process, and use risky practices (e.g. the copy-paste technique) so that the software can be released as fast as possible. However, these practices may turn out to be critical from the viewpoint of maintainability of the software system. In such cases, a cost-effective solution might be to re-engineer the system. Re-engineering consists of two stages, namely reverse-engineering information from the current system and, based on this information, forward-engineering the system to a new form. In this way, successful re-engineering significantly depends on the reverse engineering phase. Therefore, it is vital to guarantee correctness, and to improve the results of the reverse engineering step. Otherwise, the re-engineering of the software system could fail due to the bad results of reverse engineering. The above issues motivated us to develop a method which extends and improves one of our reverse engineering tools, and to develop benchmarks and to perform experiments on evaluating and comparing reverse engineering tools

Roundtrip engineering of NoSQL databases

International audienceIn this article we present a framework describing a roundtrip engineering process for NoSQLdatabase systems. This framework, based on the Model Driven Engineering approach, is composed of aknowledge base guiding the roundtrip process. Starting from a roundtrip generic scenario, we proposeseveral roundtrip scenarios combining forward and reverse engineering processes. We illustrate ourapproach with an example related to a property graph database. The illustrative scenario consists ofsuccessive steps of model enrichment combined with forward and reverse engineering processes. Futureresearch will consist in designing and implementing the main components of the knowledge base

The DevOps Goes to the Embedded System

Lately, DevOps has been widely discussed in various papers, in addition the industry has implemented it to be a solution for developing and distributing software for general purposes. However, the application of DevOps to embedded systems is still quite difficult, and there is still lack of paper to discuss it. The purpose of this study is to explore the DevOps approach in developing embedded systems. The method used in this research is to use the Object-Oriented Software Engineering approach. Various tools used to support the development of embedded systems include Visual Paradigm, Quantum Modeling. The results explain that DevOps can be applied in the development of embeded systems through Forward and Reverse Engineering. Forward engineering includes analysis, design of the class, design of the state machine, design of coding, generate code, uploading some codes into board. While reverse engineering is reverse from forward engineering. However, the applying of DevOps is not still one stop services. It is signed by the displacement of tools when doing state-machine design, there is a shift in the use of tools, from the visual paradigm to quantum modeling

Dynamic Protocol Reverse Engineering a Grammatical Inference Approach

Round trip engineering of software from source code and reverse engineering of software from binary files have both been extensively studied and the state-of-practice have documented tools and techniques. Forward engineering of protocols has also been extensively studied and there are firmly established techniques for generating correct protocols. While observation of protocol behavior for performance testing has been studied and techniques established, reverse engineering of protocol control flow from observations of protocol behavior has not received the same level of attention. State-of-practice in reverse engineering the control flow of computer network protocols is comprised of mostly ad hoc approaches. We examine state-of-practice tools and techniques used in three open source projects: Pidgin, Samba, and rdesktop . We examine techniques proposed by computational learning researchers for grammatical inference. We propose to extend the state-of-art by inferring protocol control flow using grammatical inference inspired techniques to reverse engineer automata representations from captured data flows. We present evidence that grammatical inference is applicable to the problem domain under consideration

Software engineering

Today's software systems generally use obsolete technology, are not integrated properly with other software systems, and are difficult and costly to maintain. The discipline of reverse engineering is becoming prominent as organizations try to move their systems up to more modern and maintainable technology in a cost effective manner. The Johnson Space Center (JSC) created a significant set of tools to develop and maintain FORTRAN and C code during development of the space shuttle. This tool set forms the basis for an integrated environment to reengineer existing code into modern software engineering structures which are then easier and less costly to maintain and which allow a fairly straightforward translation into other target languages. The environment will support these structures and practices even in areas where the language definition and compilers do not enforce good software engineering. The knowledge and data captured using the reverse engineering tools is passed to standard forward engineering tools to redesign or perform major upgrades to software systems in a much more cost effective manner than using older technologies. The latest release of the environment was in Feb. 1992

Software reengineering

Today's software systems generally use obsolete technology, are not integrated properly with other software systems, and are difficult and costly to maintain. The discipline of reverse engineering is becoming prominent as organizations try to move their systems up to more modern and maintainable technology in a cost effective manner. JSC created a significant set of tools to develop and maintain FORTRAN and C code during development of the Space Shuttle. This tool set forms the basis for an integrated environment to re-engineer existing code into modern software engineering structures which are then easier and less costly to maintain and which allow a fairly straightforward translation into other target languages. The environment will support these structures and practices even in areas where the language definition and compilers do not enforce good software engineering. The knowledge and data captured using the reverse engineering tools is passed to standard forward engineering tools to redesign or perform major upgrades to software systems in a much more cost effective manner than using older technologies. A beta vision of the environment was released in Mar. 1991. The commercial potential for such re-engineering tools is very great. CASE TRENDS magazine reported it to be the primary concern of over four hundred of the top MIS executives

GRASP/Ada (Graphical Representations of Algorithms, Structures, and Processes for Ada): The development of a program analysis environment for Ada. Reverse engineering tools for Ada, task 1, phase 2

The study, formulation, and generation of structures for Ada (GRASP/Ada) are discussed in this second phase report of a three phase effort. Various graphical representations that can be extracted or generated from source code are described and categorized with focus on reverse engineering. The overall goal is to provide the foundation for a CASE (computer-aided software design) environment in which reverse engineering and forward engineering (development) are tightly coupled. Emphasis is on a subset of architectural diagrams that can be generated automatically from source code with the control structure diagram (CSD) included for completeness

TRACEM - Towards a Standard Metamodel for Execution Traces in Model-Driven Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is a crucial stage in the software modernization process. The current techniques available in existing CASE tools provide forward engineering and limited facilities for reverse engineering, dynamic analysis in particular. The Architecture-Driven Modernization initiative has defined standards to support the modernization process in the model-driven engineering (MDE) context. Standardization increases interoperability between different tools enabling a new generation of solutions to benefit the whole industry and encourage collaboration among complementary vendors. In this paper, we present TRACEM, a metamodel to represent trace information under a standard representation. This metamodel complements a MDE framework for software modernization that aims to integrate static and dynamic analysis techniques during the reverse engineering process. This paper includes a case study that exemplifies how dynamic information combined with static information allows improving the whole reverse engineering process.XIX Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic