Collaborative Reengineering and Modularization of Software Systems

Software systems evolve over their lifetime. Changing requirements make it inevitable to modify and extend the underlying source code. Understanding software systems embodies a crucial task, which needs to be addressed in an appropriate way to face inevitable challenges while performing software changes. In this thesis, we introduce three complementary approaches to support the evolution and particularly understanding of software systems in different aspects. Our main contributions are (i) an approach named CORAL for enabling collaborative reengineering and modularization of software systems, (ii) a gesture-based, collaborative, and multi-user-featuring Virtual Reality approach named ExplorViz VR for the software city metaphor, and (iii) a database behavior live-visualization approach named RACCOON for database comprehension of software systems. An extensive case study shows that our CORAL approach is capable of supporting reengineering and modularization processes. Furthermore, several evaluations demonstrate the high usability, and efficiency and effectiveness for solving comprehension tasks when using our multi-user VR approach ExplorViz VR