Metric-centered and technology-independent architectural views for software comprehension

Authors

  • Luis F. Mendivelso Universidad de los Andes
  • Kelly Garcés Universidad de los Andes
  • Rubby Casallas Universidad de los Andes

Keywords:

Software Comprehension, Software Visualization, Software Architecture, Model-Driven Reverse Engineering, Software Metrics

Abstract

The maintenance of applications is a crucial activity in the software industry. The high cost of this process is due to the effort invested on software comprehension since, in most of cases, there is no up-to-date abstraction or documentation to ease this task but the source code. The goal of many commercial and academic tools is to build software architectural views from the code. The main disadvantages of such tools are: i) they are dependent on the language/technology on top of which the application is built; and ii) they offer pre-defined views that are too difficult to adapt to meet particular software comprehension needs. In this paper, we present a Technology-independent approach which is flexible enough to allow developers to define metric-centered architectural views by using annotations. These views display in a single canvas architectural elements whose look and feel maps software metrics. Our work results from joint projects with industry partners with software modernization needs in different technologies: Oracle Forms, Java EE, and Ruby on Rails. We present how our proposal was applied in these projects and compare the results with those of the previously followed process.

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Published

2018-12-04

How to Cite

Mendivelso, L. F., Garcés, K., & Casallas, R. (2018). Metric-centered and technology-independent architectural views for software comprehension. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development, 6, 16:1 – 16:23. Retrieved from https://sol.sbc.org.br/journals/index.php/jserd/article/view/440

Issue

Section

Research Article