SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Program documentation can be an important aid to software engineers performing complex maintenance tasks on legacy applications. Unfortunately, such documentation—if it exists at all—is often of low quality, usually provides a single perspective, and is difficult to integrate into the overall software process. One way of producing useful documentation for existing software systems is through reverse engineering, which is the process of analyzing source code (and related artifacts) to generate higher-level views of the subject system. This dissertation presents an integrated approach to program redo cumentation. The approach is based on an adoption-centric reverse engineering methodology that leverages commonly available tools to realize required functionality. Data gathered from multiple sources is blended using a common schema. Standardized interchange formats such as XML are used to facilitate interoperability. Documentation containing desired information not available by analyzing isolated data sources is synthesized on demand. The result is a documentation package that is of high quality, provides multiple perspectives, and is easily integrated into existing software processes. A prototype toolset was constructed according to the guidelines provided by the integrated approach. The toolset was used to redocument selected aspects of a transmission control system for a commercial automotive engine. A preliminary maturity model for program documentation was developed as a means of assessing the efficacy of the approach and the quality of the result in this context.