A reverse engineering toolkit for design recovery

Abstract

Migration of code from an imperative paradigm to other paradigms, including the parallel/distributed paradigm, is often done in an ad hoc manner. In order to systematically approach this problem, we first need the design of the original system. In this paper we describe a reverse engineering toolkit that we developed to extract the design of a system. An object-oriented design and implementation were used in the development of the toolkit. By using the toolkit, we can comprehend a program's modules and how they interact with each other. The information extracted is amenable for an abstraction of a parallel design. Also, the design of the toolkit facilitates object extraction from imperative code.