Universal report: a generic reverse engineering tool

Abstract

Source code documentation is a structured report built from the information available in the source of a given program. 'The goal of such a document is to provide more facility for program comprehension and code maintenance. This is particularly crucial for complex program involving a large amount of routines and special statements. Nowadays, there are more and more specialized programs that are provided to programmers through their source code as a module. Their integration into an existing project requires a quick but accurate overview of their technical structure for immediate comprehension. This task needs a so-called source code documentation tool, also called documentation tool, code documenting tool, or reverse engineering tool. Several tools exist, but most of them are dedicated to a specific programming language, probably because they strongly consider the grammar of the target language and the corresponding statements are then hardcoded. In this paper, we present Universal Report, a source code documentation tool developed with C++ Builder, that does not suffer from this limitation and provides several attractive features for a complete documenting task. The tool is generic, specific information being provided by the user as input for the documenting process. This flexibility is due to powerful heuristics and pattern matching algorithms that can identify standard programming statements for a wide range of programming languages. Various options enable the user to format the output documentation at its convenience, and the intuitive interface makes Universal Report the perfect tool for both new and experienced users.