moose a collaborative and extensible reengineering.pdfVIP

Moose: a Collaborative and Extensible Reengineering Environment Stéphane Ducasse, Tudor Gîrba, Michele Lanza Software Composition Group University of Berne – Switzerland Serge Demeyer Lab On Re-Engineering University Of Antwerp – Belgium Abstract Software systems are complex and difficult to analyze. Reverse engineer- ing is a complex analysis that usually involves combining different techniques and tools. Moreover, oftentimes the existing tools are not perfectly suitable for the task, and customization of existing tools, or development of new tools is required. Moose is an extensible reengineering environment designed to provide the necessary infrastructure for tool integration. Moose centers on a language independent meta-model, and offers services like grouping, query- ing, navigation, and advanced tool integration mechanism. 1. Introduction Reverse engineering is a complex analysis usually consisting of a combina- tion of techniques such as: parsing the code, building a model of the code, measuring the code, visualizing, etc (Demeyer, Ducasse Tichelaar, 1999). Sometimes, we want to complement the code information with other kinds of information like bug reports or documentation. For different techniques we need different tools, but we need these tools to collaborate and complement each other without pre-imposing the sequence of using these tools and tech- niques. Furthermore, real-life systems come in different shapes and sizes; there- fore we need our tools to scale (Ducasse and Tichelaar, 2003). We present Moose – an extensible and scalable reengineering environment that allows tools to collaborate. First, we show a scenario of using Moose on JBoss, a large Java open source case stud