Extracting Object Oriented Software Architecture from C++ Source Code

Software architecture strongly influences the ability to satisfy quality attributes such as modifiability, performance, and security. It is important to be able to analyse and extract information about that architecture. However, architectural documentation frequently does not exist, and when it does, it is often out of sync with the implemented system. In addition, it is not all that software development begins with a clean slate; systems are almost always constrained by the existing legacy code. As a consequence, there is a need to extract information from existing system implementations and reason architecturally about this information. This research presents a reverse engineering tool VOO++ that will read an Object- Oriented C++ source code using UML notation in order to visualise its Class structure and the various relationships that may exist including, inheritance, aggregation, and dependency relationships based on the modified Cohen-Sutherland clipping algorithm. The idea of clipping is reversed, instead of clipping inside the rectangle, the clipping is done out side the rectangle in terms of four directions (left, right, top, and bottom) and two points represent the centre point for each rectangle. An Object-Oriented approach is used to design and implement the tool. Reverse engineering, design pattern, and graphics are the underlying techniques supplied. VOO++ aids an analyst in extracting, manipulating and interpreting the Object-Oriented static model information. By assisting in the reconstruction of static architectures from extracted information, VOO++ helps an analyst to redocument and understand architectures and discover the relationship between "as-implemented" and "asdesigned" architectures.

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