Towards Reverse Engineering for Component-Based Systems with Domain Knowledge of the Technologies Used

Abstract

Many developers today face the challenge of managing and maintaining existing legacy software systems. Improving the understanding of these systems is an important issue in addressing these challenges. To improve understanding, reverse engineering can be used to generate a higher-level representation. However, generic and extensible reverse engineering solutions that address multiple types of different technologies are missing or incomplete. This paper proposes to take a step in this direction. We describe the underlying idea of how used technologies such as frameworks and libraries induce parts of the architecture. Building on this, we describe our proposed approach of how the similarities of different technologies can be used to redevelop component-based architectures. By incorporating knowledge about technologies, we aim to improve the result of reverse engineering processes.