The SPOOL Design Repository: Architecture, Schema, and Mechanisms

Abstract

The landscape of reverse engineering is rich in tools for the recovery, quantification, and analysis of source code. Most of these tools, however, cover only a small slice of what the notion of reverse engineering promises: “a process of analyzing a subject system to (a) identify the systems components and their interrelationships and (b) create representations of a system in another form at a higher level of abstraction” (Chikofsky and Cross, 1990). These tools hardly take into account that reverse engineering is a process of collaborating activities, rather than a focused task of investigating some specific software property. To be effective, the process of reverse engineering demands that tools communicate and that infrastructure support be provided for their coordination. In the SPOOL project, we have developed and integrated a suite of tools in which each tool addresses a different task of reverse engineering yet allows for easy transfer of the gathered information to other tools for further processing (cf. Chapter 6). At the core of such tool collaboration lies the SPOOL repository.