A visual analysis and design tool for planning software reengineerings

Abstract

Reengineering complex software systems represents a non-trivial process. As a fundamental technique in software engineering, reengineering includes (a) reverse engineering the as-is system design, (b) identifying a set of transformations to the design, and (c) applying these transformations. While methods a) and c) are widely supported by existing tools, identifying possible transformations to improve architectural quality is not well supported and, therefore, becomes increasingly complex in aged and large software systems. In this paper we present a novel visual analysis and design tool to support software architects during reengineering tasks in identifying a given software's design and in visually planning quality-improving changes to its design. The tool eases estimating effort and change impact of a planned reengineering. A prototype implementation shows the proposed technique's feasibility. Three case studies conducted on industrial software systems demonstrate usage and scalability of our approach.