Reusable Component Identification by Code Understanding through Program Transformation in RRRA

Abstract

Code understanding is almost the most essential step in all the post-delivery software activities such as software maintenance, re-engineering and reuse. In Reverse-engineering Reuse Re-engineering Assistant(RRRA), A tool aiming at providing an overall approach for all the post-delivery software activities, code understanding was addressed by reverse engineering through program transformation. The paper proposes a method to deal with this problem and discuss in detail how program transformation techniques, program comprehension techniques and the role of human knowledge are integrated into RRRA, i.e., how they are used by reverse engineering to recognize reusable components and how they are used semantic interface analysis to formally represent reusable components. The experiments strongly suggest the proposed method is a practical approach to software reuse.