Revealer: a lexical pattern matcher for architecture recovery

Abstract

Program comprehension is crucial for software maintenance activities and is supported by reverse engineering techniques. Many of them analyze source code and use parsers to create higher-level representations of software systems that are more meaningful to engineers. But the application of parsers is for some reasons not always desirable. In this paper, we introduce Revealer a lightweight source model extraction tool that combines advantages of lexical analysis with syntactical analysis. It uses an easy-to-use pattern language that supports engineers in defining pattern definitions of diverse granularity depending on the problem at hand In this way our tool enables fast extraction of simple and complex code patterns that allow engineers a quick insight into particular architectural aspects that are expressed via source code patterns.