Abstract
Many scientists who implement computational science and engineering software have adopted the object-oriented (OO) Fortran paradigm. One of the challenges faced by OO Fortran developers is the inability to obtain high level software design descriptions of existing applications. Knowledge of the overall software design is not only valuable in the absence of documentation, it can also serve to assist developers with accomplishing different tasks during the software development process, especially maintenance and refactoring. The software engineering community commonly uses reverse engineering techniques to deal with this challenge. A number of reverse engineering-based tools have been proposed, but few of them can be applied to OO Fortran applications. In this paper, we propose a software tool to extract unified modeling language (UML) class diagrams from Fortran code. The UML class diagram facilitates the developers' ability to examine the entities and their relationships in the software system. The extracted diagrams enhance software maintenance and evolution. The experiments carried out to evaluate the proposed tool show its accuracy and a few of the limitations.
Highlights
Computational research has been referred to as the third pillar of scientific and engineering research, along with experimental and theoretical research [1]
This paper presents and evaluates the ForUML tool that can be used for extracting unified modeling language (UML) class diagram from Fortran code
Fortran is one of the predominant programming languages used in the Computational science and engineering (CSE) software domain
Summary
Computational research has been referred to as the third pillar of scientific and engineering research, along with experimental and theoretical research [1]. Computational science and engineering (CSE) researchers develop software to simulate natural phenomena that cannot be studied experimentally or to process large amounts of data. CSE software has a large impact on society as it is used by researchers to study critical problems in a number of important application domains, including weather forecasting, astrophysics, construction of new physical materials, and cancer research [2]. The software engineering (SE) community has become more interested in the development of software for CSE research In this critical type of software, Fortran is still a very widely used programming language [4]. Due to the growing complexity of the problems being addressed through CSE, the procedural programming style available in a language like Fortran 77 is no longer sufficient. Many developers have applied the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm to effectively implement the complex data structures required by CSE software. By including full support for OOP constructs, the Fortran 2003 language standard influenced the advent of several CSE packages [8,9,10,11,12]
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