Recovering Behavioral Design Views: a Query-Based Approach

The reality of software development is such that engineers must often perform maintenance tasks with missing or out-of-date documentation and without the support of the original developers. To understand the software as it is now, engineers use reverse engineering tools to recover information from the code itself. Most such tools analyze only static information about the system and so provide engineers with structural, rather than behavioral models. It is, however, critical to understand the behavioral aspect of the software system in order to carry out certain maintenance tasks. To better understand program behavior engineers turn to tools which use dynamic information collected during program execution. Such tools typically display all the dynamic information at very fine granularity, making it difficult to extract manageable models of behavior. They then rely on visualization and navigation techniques to help the engineer locate information relevant to the change task. In this dissertation we propose an approach to recovering behavioral models from object-oriented software which is based on perspectives. Our approach enables an enginee