An Open Toolkit for Reverse Engineering Data Visualisation and Exploration

Maintenance and evolution of complex software systems (such as mobile telephones) involves activities such as reverse engineering (RE) and software visualisation. The RE conceptual framework for describing software understanding and concept abstraction is implemented up to different degrees by several RE tools. We found the architecture of most such tools hard to adapt to the domain specific requirements posed by our current practice in Nokia. We believe that the architecture of a RE tool should reflect the conceptual framework’s logical steps. We propose such an architecture and present a concrete RE toolkit that implements it. The toolkit provides a flexible way to build RE scenarios by subclassing and composition of a few basic components. We pay special attention to the visual and interactive requirements of the RE process. We show our plans to use it for further research on visualising the complex software structures that we extract from our products