Reverse Engineering Encapsulated components from Legacy Code

Abstract

Component-based development is an approach that revolves around the construction of systems form pre-built modular units (components). If legacy code can be reverse engineered to extract components, the extracted components can provide architectural re-usability across multiple systems of the same domain. Current component directed reverse engineering approaches are based on component models that belong to architecture description languages (ADLs). ADL-based components cannot be reused without configurational changes at code level and binding every required and provided service. Moreover, these component models neither support code-independent composition after extraction of components nor the re-deposition of a composed configuration of components for future reuse. This thesis presents a reverse engineering approach that extracts components and addresses the limitations of current approaches, together with a tool called RX-MAN. Unlike ADL-based approaches, the presented approach is based on an encapsulated component model called X-MAN. X-MAN components are encapsulated because computation cannot go outside of a component. X-MAN components cannot interact directly but only exogenously (composition is defined outside of a component). Our approach offers code-independent composition after extracting components and does not need binding of all the services like ADLs. The evaluation of our approach shows that it can facilitate the re-usability of legacy code by providing code-independent composition and re-deposition of composed configurations of components for further reuse and composition.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Liping Zhao (Supervisor) & Kung-Kiu Lau (Supervisor)