A cognitive and user centric based approach for reverse engineering tool design

  • Authors:

  • Iyad Zayour;Timothy C. Lethbridge

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Technology and Engineering, 150 Louis Pasteur, University of Ottawa, K1N 6N5 Canada;School of Information Technology and Engineering, 150 Louis Pasteur, University of Ottawa, K1N 6N5 Canada

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '00 Proceedings of the 2000 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Reverse engineering tools aimed at facilitating software maintenance suffer from low adoption. Many are developed, but few are used by software engineers in performing their maintenance work. We introduce an approach for tool design that is aimed at increasing the adoptability potential of tools.Our approach is based on applying cognitive analysis to identify cognitively difficult aspects of maintenance work, then deriving cognitive requirements to address these difficulties. The approach is described in the context of the implementation of a reverse engineering tool we call DynaSee, which we have used to for the visualization of traces generated by a large telecommunications system. We describe how DynaSee addresses a specific set of cognitive difficulties.