Columbus 2.0 – Tool for Reverse Engineering Large Object Oriented Software Systems

Abstract

One of the most critical issues in large-scale software development and maintenance is the rapidly growing size and complexity of the software systems. As a result of this rapid growth there is a need to understand the relationships between the different parts of a large system. In this paper we present a reverse engineering framework called Columbus that is able to analyze large C/C++ projects. Columbus supports project handling, data extraction, data representation and data storage. Efficient filtering methods can be used to produce comprehensible diagrams from the extracted information. The flexible architecture of the Columbus system (based on plug-ins) makes it a really versatile and an easily extendible tool for reverse engineering.

BibTeX:

@TechReport{FMB00,
    author      = {Ferenc, Rudolf and Magyar, Ferenc and Besz\'edes, {\'A}rp\'ad and M\'arton, G\'abor and Tarkiainen, Mikko and Gyim\'othy, Tibor},
    title       = {{C}olumbus 2.0 -- Tool for Reverse Engineering Large Object Oriented Software Systems},
    institution = {University of Szeged},
    year        = {2000},
    type        = {techreport},
    address     = {Szeged, Hungary},
}