Reverse engineering collaboratory: a logic-based tool for monitoring the quality of programs

Much of the research carried out by groups working at physically distributed sites is conducted over the Internet. This has given rise to the tendency to set up metalaboratories, comprising research personnel, machines and tools that are not physically present in the same geographical place. For instance, the term 'Collaboratory' combines the concept of 'Collaboration' between researchers who are located in different geographical areas, and the 'Laboratory' they use to carry out their work. This paper shows an application of the collaboration paradigm, in which a tool has been developed and has begun to be made available to users over Internet. This is a Prolog-Based tool for monitoring the quality of a program written in some of the most commonly used programming languages (Cobol and C). This is useful and, in many cases, indispensable during the reverse engineering phase: that is, the phase devoted to reconstructing the documentation from existing code, to check whether a program has a given level of quality, whether certain parts of it may turn out to be critical from a qualitative viewpoint if repeated maintenance interventions are carried out on it, and finally whether the program itself could be a candidate for reuse and, if so, whether it constitutes a single element of a catalog of reusable programs. The tool is set up in LPA Prolog on a Windows 3.11 platform, and is part of a larger environment dedicated to the activities of software understanding through reverse engineering. The user connects to an internet address, uses the tool (which may be remotely calibrated), and takes the desired reading before importing the measurement results. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved