Modern object oriented software systems, to meet the continuously growing expectations of the market, are getting more and more complex. Additionally, the lack of documentation and plans, which is missing because of tight deadlines, makes it even more difficult to understand the systems. The biggest need in comprehending the source code is in the maintenance phase of the software lifecycle, when different modifications need to be done, like bug-fixing and adding new functionality. This originated the reverse engineering research within the science of software engineering. The aim is to produce a higher level description from a given specification, for instance the design documentation from the source code in our case. Nowadays, standard UML notation is used in most cases for designs. So it is an obvious need to present the recovered design documentation with UML diagrams. Additional visualizations based on different aspects can also remarkably improve source code comprehension (e.g. call graphs). Among the newest research activities is the recognition of design patterns from source code, with which the software system can be approached from an even higher level. Another large research area is the measuring of software quality, where different metrics have a big role. The staff at the University of Szeged Informatics Department in cooperation with the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki and FrontEndART Ltd. developed a reverse engineering tool called Columbus, which helps in source code comprehension and documentation. Using its analyzer engine another tool called CPPAudit was made as well, which checks different coding conventions and gives warnings on dangerous code constructs.
BibTeX:
@InProceedings{FeB03,
author = {Ferenc, Rudolf and Besz\'edes, {\'A}rp\'ad},
title = {Az Objektumvez\'erelt Szoftverek Elemz\'ese},
booktitle = {VIII. Orsz\'agos (Centen\'ariumi) Neumann Kongresszus El{\H{o}}ad\'asok \'es {\"O}sszefoglal\'ok},
year = {2003},
pages = {463--474},
address = {Budapest, Hungary},
month = oct,
publisher = {Neumann J\'anos Sz\'am\'it\'og\'ep-tudom\'anyi T\'arsas\'ag},
}