Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented Systems to ALF

Abstract

In Model Driven Software Engineering (MDSE), Action Language for Foundational UML (ALF) is a new standard for specifying the structure and behavior of a system textually. To update/transform existing systems with respect to advance business needs and/or by the change in the dependent technology, this standard can play a vital role in reverse engineering a system for technology change. In this paper, using ALF, we propose a reverse engineering approach for transforming object oriented system. Our work is the first attempt to use ALF in reverse engineering. Using a case study (an ATM system) of significant size developed in C[Formula: see text], we validate the feasibility of our approach. In this paper, to support our approach by a computer application, we created a tool CPP2ALF; this tool converts the C[Formula: see text] code to srcML code by using a third party srcML-tool and then generates the ALF code by using the generated srcML code.