Working Conference on Reverse Engineering 

About: Working Conference on Reverse Engineering is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Software system & Software maintenance. Over the lifetime, 788 publications have been published by the conference receiving 30835 citations.

On finding duplication and near-duplication in large software systems

Abstract: This paper describes how a program called dup can be used to locate instances of duplication or near-duplication in a software system. Dup reports both textually identical sections of code and sections that are the same textually except for systematic substitution of one set of variable names and constants for another. Further processing locates longer sections of code that are the same except for other small modifications. Experimental results from running dup on millions of lines from two large software systems show dup to be both effective at locating duplication and fast. Applications could include identifying sections of code that should be replaced by procedures, elimination of duplication during reengineering of the system, redocumentation to include references to copies, and debugging.

Identifying similar code with program dependence graphs

Abstract: We present an approach to identifying similar code in programs based on finding similar subgraphs in attributed directed graphs. This approach is used on program dependence graphs and therefore considers not only the syntactic structure of programs but also the data flow within (as an abstraction of the semantics). As a result, there is no tradeoff between precision and recall; our approach is very good in both. An evaluation of our prototype implementation shows that the approach is feasible and gives very good results despite the non polynomial complexity of the problem.

The octagon abstract domain

Abstract: The article presents a novel numerical abstract domain for static analysis by abstract interpretation. It extends a former numerical abstract domain based on Difference-Bound Matrices and allows us to represent invariants of the form (/spl plusmn/x/spl plusmn/y/spl les/c), where x and y are program variables and c is a real constant. We focus on giving an efficient representation based on Difference-Bound Matrices with O(n/sup 2/) memory cost, where n is the number of variables, and graph-based algorithms for all common abstract operators, with O(n/sup 3/) time cost. This includes a normal form algorithm to test the equivalence of representation and a widening operator to compute least fixpoint approximations.

An information retrieval approach to concept location in source code

Abstract: Concept location identifies parts of a software system that implement a specific concept that originates from the problem or the solution domain. Concept location is a very common software engineering activity that directly supports software maintenance and evolution tasks such as incremental change and reverse engineering. This work addresses the problem of concept location using an advanced information retrieval method, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is used to map concepts expressed in natural language by the programmer to the relevant parts of the source code. Results of a case study on NCSA Mosaic are presented and compared with previously published results of other static methods for concept location.

GUI ripping: reverse engineering of graphical user interfaces for testing

Abstract: Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are important parts oftoday's software and their correct execution is required toensure the correctness of the overall software. A populartechnique to detect defects in GUIs is to test them by executingtest cases and checking the execution results. Testcases may either be created manually or generated automaticallyfrom a model of the GUI. While manual testingis unacceptably slow for many applications, our experiencewith GUI testing has shown that creating a model that canbe used for automated test case generation is difficult.We describe a new approach to reverse engineer a modelrepresented as structures called a GUI forest, event-flowgraphs and an integration tree directly from the executableGUI. We describe "GUI Ripping", a dynamic process inwhich the software's GUI is automatically "traversed" byopening all its windows and extracting all their widgets(GUI objects), properties, and values. The extracted informationis then verified by the test designer and used to automaticallygenerate test cases. We present algorithms for theripping process and describe their implementation in a toolsuite that operates on Java and Microsoft Windows' GUIs.We present results of case studies which show that ourapproach requires very little human intervention and is especiallyuseful for regression testing of software that is modifiedfrequently. We have successfully used the "GUI Ripper"in several large experiments and have made it availableas a downloadable tool.