Reverse Engineering in the ADM Context

Abstract

Reverse engineering is a crucial stage in the software modernization process. The Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) initiative emerged with the aim of defining standards to support the modernization process in the model driven development context being relevant for reverse engineering the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel and the Abstract Syntax Tree Metamodel. In this paper, the ADM principles are applied to provide high-level views of legacy systems. A framework to reverse engineering UML models from object-oriented code is described. The proposal is exemplified by a case study showing how to recover use case and interaction diagrams from Java code. The proposal was validated using the Eclipse Modeling Framework and MoDisco platform that can be considered the official implementation of the ADM standards.