Title
Interface protocol inference to aid understanding legacy software components
Author
Aslam, K.
Luo, Y.
Schiffelers, R.
van den Brand, M.
Contributor
Berger, R. (editor)
Hebig, T. (editor)
Publication year
2018
Abstract
More and more high tech companies are struggling with the maintenance of legacy software. Legacy software is vital to many organizations, so even if its behavior is not completely understood it cannot be thrown away. To re-factor or re-engineer the legacy software components, the external behavior needs to be preserved after replacement so that the replaced components possess the same behavior in the system environment as the original components. Therefore, it is necessary to first completely understand the behavior of components over the interfaces, i.e., the interface protocols, and preserve this behavior during the software modification activities. For this purpose, we present an approach to infer the interface protocols of software components, from the behavioral models of those components learned with a blackbox technique, called active automata learning. We then perform a formal comparison between learned models and reference models ensuring the behavioral relations are preserved. This provides a validation for the learned results, thus developing confidence in applying the active learning technique to reverse engineer the legacy software components in the future. © 2018 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.
Subject
Behavioral model
External behavior
High tech companies
Interface protocol
Reference models
Software component
Software modification
System environment
Legacy systems
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:395ee326-7f3a-4858-8eb0-c584b3e08223
TNO identifier
865918
Publisher
CEUR-WS
ISSN
1613-0073
Source
CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2018 MODELS Workshops: ModComp, MRT, OCL, FlexMDE, EXE, COMMitMDE, MDETools, GEMOC, MORSE, MDE4IoT, MDEbug, MoDeVVa, ME, MULTI, HuFaMo, AMMoRe, PAINS, MODELS-WS 2018, 14 October 2018 through 19 October 2018, 6-11
Document type
conference paper