Using Robustness Diagrams to Help With Software Understanding: an Eclipse Plug-in

In the reverse engineering of a software program, one of the key difficulties isactually to understand the software. While the published techniques work topdown or bottom up, our approach works middle-out: before trying to understandthe low level code, we first rebuild a hypothetical analysis model from the usecasesof the system. This model then represents the target of the understandingtask. In fact we try to map the code elements to the analysis objects. For thisapproach to be useable in large industrial software systems, it must be supportedby a powerful tool. This paper presents the Eclipse plug-in we developedto support our methodology, as well as a reverse engineering scenario usingthis tool. We then discuss the technology we used and the result we obtained.