Reverse engineering by mining dynamic repositories

Abstract

This paper presents some preliminary results on applying information retrieval and knowledge-mining techniques to reverse engineering of legacy systems. In order to support a dynamic environment, we take an approach of integrating lightweight tools. Instead of forcing a user to use a fixed environment, our approach provides a basic information repository, which manages information extracted from the documentation and source code. The system stores this information in a graph structure, it supports navigation through the repository, and modification of its structure and annotation. Preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach on the small-size software system is encouraging.