Design Suite: Towards an Open Scientific Investigation Environment for Software Architecture Recovery
Roberto A. Bittencourt, Jemerson Figueiredo Damásio, Gustavo Santos, José Martins da Nóbrega, Dalton Guerrero · 2009
Empirical research in architecture recovery suffers from a lack of open scientific environments for experimentation. Moreover, used tools generally suffer from interoperability issues, either being too languagespecific or requiring the use of a variety of data exchange formats. This paper describes Design Suite, a toolset that targets these issues and is used to extract low-level designs from source code, abstract them into architecture structural views and visualize the latter in different software visualization layouts. Designs and architecture views are represented as directed, typed, attributed multi-graphs which are exchanged between tools through the XML-based GXL standard. A proof of concept is presented as an initial evaluation of the suite. Resumo. Pesquisas experimentais sobre recuperacao arquitetural sofrem com a ausencia de ambientes de experimentacao cientificos abertos. Alem disso, as ferramentas atuais possuem baixa interoperabilidade. Este artigo apresenta a Design Suite, uma suite de ferramentas que tenta atacar estas questoes e que permite extrair designs de codigo-fonte, abstrai-los em visoes arquiteturais estruturais e visualiza-las em diferentes leiautes. Designs e visoes arquiteturais sao representados por multigrafos dirigidos, tipados e com atributos, os quais podem ser trocados entre as ferramentas atraves de GXL, um padrao baseado em XML. Uma prova de conceito e apresentada como avaliacao preliminar da suite.