Experience Report on Building ASTM Based Tools for Multi-language Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering tools are utilized for development, maintenance, and modernization of software systems. The reverse engineering community has developed a large number of reverse engineering tools for different programming languages that support a variety of software engineering activities. Although tools address different reverse engineering problems and different programming languages, several issues with respect to parsing, intermediate representations, code query, program analysis, etc. are similar. However, reuse between tools takes place only on a moderate scale. To facilitate reuse in building reverse engineering tools, we have used the OMG standard ASTM as intermediate representation of source code together with black box reuse of existing (free) language parsers. In this paper we report on challenges, experiences, and solutions from several industrial research projects, in which ASTM based reverse engineering tools have been developed and used for re-documentation, re-engineering, and modernization of software systems.