Automated generation of SW design constructs from Mesa source code

This thesis is concerned with the Reverse Engineering of Mesa code. Mesa is a programming language used by the Xerox Corporation especially designed for ultra large scale software projects. Many Xerox projects have considerable amounts of code already developed and in service with very little up to date design documentation. The maintenance phase of Software requires that updates will occur continuously in response to customer demands. Software engineers, often not the original designers, will need to gain a thorough understanding of the code to make reliable changes. This thesis proposes to outline Software tools developed in Mesa that will extract design information. The extracted information should be suitable for the graphical and tabular representations of architectural constructs. The tools will be written and applied originally to a small portion of a current project. These will serve as prototype for tools that could be scaled up to parse several hundred thousand lines of code. Clearly, not all design information is available from the code. The theory section of the thesis will develop an understanding of the design documentation expectations and compare these to the information that can be Reverse Engineered from code