Conceptual Module Querying for Software Reengineering

Many tools have been built to analyze source code. Most of these tools do not adequately support reengineering activities because they do not allow a software engineer to simultaneously perform queries about both the existing and the desired source structure. This paper introduces the conceptual module approach that overcomes this limitation. A conceptual module is a set of lines of source that are treated as a logical unit. We show how the approach simplifies the gathering of source information for reengineering tasks, and describe how a tool to support the approach was built as a front-end to existing source analysis tools. Keywords Source code analysis, software reuse, code scavenge, software structure, modularization, reverse engineering

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Elisa L. A. Baniassad, Gail C. Murphy
• Keywords: Conceptual Module, Conceptual Module Approach, ICSE 1998, Software Engineering, Source Code