An open visualization toolkit for reverse architecting

Abstract

Maintenance and evolution of complex software systems (such as large telecom embedded devices) involve activities such as reverse engineering (RE) and software visualization. Although several RE tools exist, we found their architecture hard to adapt to the domain specific requirements posed by our current practice in Nokia. We present an open architecture which allows easy prototyping of RE data exploration and visualization scenarios for a large range of domain models. We pay special attention to the visual and interactive requirements of the reverse engineering process. The article describes the basic architecture of our toolkit, compares it to the existing RE environments and present several visualizations taken from real cases.