Development and Application of Reverse Engineering Measures in a Re-engineering Tool

Abstract

If software metrics are useful in a forward software engineering environment, they are vital in a reverse engineering one. We are endeavouring to develop suitable metrics for software engineers who urgently need them for reverse engineering legacy systems. We propose that the metrics for reverse engineering in our re-engineering tool, the Re-engineering Assistant(RA), are developed under five categories: complexity, abstractness, object orentation, economics and reusability. The main task of reverse engineering is to extract a representation of existiong systems at a high level of abstraction. This main characteristic is reflected in our study. Complexity measures are used to indicate how complex it is to reverse engineer a piece of existiong code. Abstractness measures indicate at what level of abstraction the exisiting cde is and whether the code is abstract enough to understand. Object orentedness measures indicate how object orented the code is for those re-engineers who are hoping to transform myriad conventioal procedural systems into object-orented ones via reverse engineering. Economics(cost estimation)measures indicate the cost to reverse engineer the existing code. Reusability measurees indicate to what extent the reverse engineered existiong code can reused. Several neasures under each of the above categories have been developed or adopted, and "justified" in this study. Examples are also presented.