An Open Toolkit for Prototyping Reverse Engineering Visualizations

Abstract

Maintenance and evolution of complex software systems (such as mobile telephones) involves activities such as reverse engineering (RE) and software visualization. Although several RE tools exist, we found their architecture hard to adapt to the domain and problem specific requirements posed by our current practice in Nokia. In this paper, we present an open architecture which allows easy prototyping of RE data exploration and visualization scenarios for a large range of domain models. We pay special attention to the visual and interactive requirements of the reverse engineering process. We compare our toolkit with other existing reverse engineering visual tools and outline the differences.