CoordInspector: A Tool for Extracting Coordination Data from Legacy Code

Abstract

More and more current software systems rely on non trivial coordination logic for combining autonomous services typically running on different platforms and often owned by different organizations. Often, however, coordination data is deeply entangled in the code and, therefore, difficult to isolate and analyse separately. CoordInspector is a software tool which combines slicing and program analysis techniques to isolate all coordination elements from the source code of an existing application. Such a reverse engineering process provides a clear view of the actually invoked services as well as of the orchestration patterns which bind them together. The tool analyses Common Intermediate Language (CIL) code, the native language of Microsoft .Net framework. Therefore, the scope of application of CoordInspector is quite large: potentially any piece of code developed in any of the programming languages which compiles to the .Net framework. The tool generates graphical representations of the coordination layer together and identifies the underlying business process orchestrations, rendering them as Orc specifications.