Dynamix - a Meta-Model to Support Feature-Centric Analysis

Abstract

Many researchers have identified the potential of exploiting domain knowledge in a reverse engineering context. Features are abstractions that encapsulate knowledge of a problem domain and denote units of system behavior. As such, they represent a valuable resource for reverse engineering a system. The main body of feature-related reverse engineering research is concerned with feature identification, a technique to map features to source code. To fully exploit features in reverse engineering, however, we need to extend the focus beyond feature identification and exploit features as primary units of analysis. To incorporate features into reverse engineering analyses, we need to explicitly model features, their relationships to source artefacts, and their relationships to each other. To address this we propose Dynamix, am meta–model that expresses feature entities in the context of a structural metamodel of source code entities. Our meta-model supports feature-centric reverse engineering techniques that establish traceability between the problem and solution domains throughout the life-cycle of a system.