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Current research projects

 

 

Retro-specification de systèmes d’information

(Reverse Specification of information systems)

 

Project funded by the UAS strategic fund
Project N° 24245

 

In a previous project, we developed a legacy system reverse engineering method which rests on the re-documentation of the system’s use-case obtained by observing the actual users of the system. But these use-cases are never complete and accurate. In particular, the many alternative flows are often overlooked by the users.

This project is aimed at recovering the use-cases of a legacy information system, and in particular their alternative flows, starting from the mere source code with the guidance of its users. The technique will rest on dynamic (i.e. exection trace) as well as static (i.e. source code) analysis. Besides, the suitability of these techniques to the identification of SOA components from the legacy code will also be investigated.

 

This project started in January 2010 and is expected to be completed by June 2011.

 

 

Compréhension de Système d'Information basé sur la Modélisation Métier CSIM2

(Information Systems Understanding based on Business Modeling)

 

Project sponsored by the KTI/CTI fund of the Swiss Confederation

N° 10448.1 PFES-ES

 

This project aims at developing a methodology and the associated tools to help in the understanding of legacy information systems, which is a fundamental step in legacy systems reengineering. Generally, very few (if any) reliable sources of information exist on legacy information systems. But the understanding the working of these system is a required step before maintaining or reengineering them.

 

However the business model that the legacy system supports, which expresses in business terms the way the business tasks are structured and organized, is an important source of information on the supporting legacy information system. In fact it can help to answer the "why" question about the working of the latter.

 

This project will then try to bridge the gap between the business model of a system and the actual legacy Information System that supports it. This will largely be based on dynamic analysis techniques (i.e. execution trace analysis) and code to model heuristic mapping.

 

This project started in September 2009 and is expected to be completed by August 2011.

 

 

Ontology-based reverse engineering  

 

Project sponsored by the "Transfrontalier" Grant of the UAS strategic fund

 

This project is developed in collaboration with Prof. Christophe Roche, Univ. of Savoie, France.

 

This project will explore the role of domain ontology in semi-automatic reverse engineering techniques. Specifically, the current technique for the reverse-engineering of software systems are based on static (i.e. source code analysis) as well as dynamic (i.e. run time analysis) techniques. However, it is largely known today that domain knowledge greatly enhance the performance of the manual reverse-engineering of software, especially program comprehension.  But the use of domain knowledge in semi-automatic reverse engineering techniques is unclear and is relatively unexplored. The current project is aimed at:

  • Studying the use of domain ontology to enhance the performance of our current dynamic reverse-engineering techniques

  • Building the concepts and tools to model domain knowledge and reverse-engineering heuristics in reverse-engineering environment

  • Extending our reverse-engineering methodology to include the building of the relevant domain-ontology

  • Extending our Eclipse-based set of reverse-engineering tools to store and use a domain ontology

The project is developed in collaboration with Prof. Roche, who is a recognized expert in the field of domain ontology.

 

This project started in February  2008 and is expected to be completed by December 2010.