Recovering high-level views of object-oriented applications from static and dynamic information

Abstract

Recovering architectural documentation from code is crucial to maintaining and re-engineering software systems. Reverse engineering and program understanding approaches are often limited by the fact that: 1) they propose a fixed set of predefined views, and 2) they consider either purely static or purely dynamic views of the application. In this paper we present an environment supporting the generation of tailorable views of object-oriented systems from both static and dynamic information. Our approach is based on the combination of user-defined queries which allow an engineer to create high-level abstractions and to produce views using these abstractions.