David Egerton

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the Reverse Engineering of Mesa code. Mesa is a programming language used by the Xerox Corporation especially designed for ultra large scale software projects. Many Xerox projects have considerable amounts of code already developed and in service with very little up to date design documentation. The maintenance phase of Software requires that updates will occur continuously in response to customer demands. Software engineers, often not the original designers, will need to gain a thorough understanding of the code to make reliable changes. This thesis proposes to outline Software tools developed in Mesa that will extract design information. The extracted information should be suitable for the graphical and tabular representations of architectural constructs. The tools will be written and applied originally to a small portion of a current project. These will serve as prototype for tools that could be scaled up to parse several hundred thousand lines of code. Clearly, not all design information is available from the code. The theory section of the thesis will develop an understanding of the design documentation expectations and compare these to the information that can be Reverse Engineered from code.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Software maintenance; Computer-aided software engineering; Reverse engineering; MESA (Computer program language)

Publication Date

1993

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Computer Science (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Science (GCCIS)

Advisor

Kaminsky, Alan

Advisor/Committee Member

Heliotis, James

Advisor/Committee Member

Anderson, Peter

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: QA76.76.S64E44 1993

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DEgertonThesis1993-2.pdf (4373 kB)

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