Static and Dynamic Reverse Engineering For Java Systems

This dissertation shows that integration of dynamic and static information aids the performance of reverse engineering tasks. An experimental environment called Shimba has been built to support reverse engineering of Java software systems. The static information is extracted from Java byte code [118]. It can be viewed and analyzed with the Rigi reverse engineering tool [74]. The dynamic event trace information is generated automatically as a result of running the target system under a customized Java Development Kit (JDK) debugger. Information about the dynamic control flow of selected objects or methods can also be extracted. The event trace can then be viewed and analyzed with the SCED tool. To support model comprehension, the models built can be used to modify and improve each other by means of information exchange, model slicing, and building abstractions.