We describe the experiences we have had in using ManSART - a software architecture recovery tool that we developed and are employing in the analysis of large scale legacy software systems. ManSART uses a battery of standard data flow, control flow, and program slicing capabilities to automatically recover architectural features from source code. This source code analysis is enabled by representations called analysis. Analysis modules describe the interfaces of each component in a multiple component system. ManSART uses these modules to focus source code analysis and to store the results.

Automatically recovered (reverse engineered) architectural views of legacy software are valuable for carrying out many software engineering tasks.However, while directly recovered views provide some relevant information, they often are either too fragmented or complex to be really useful in practice.This paper describes methods for making views more useful.We automatically combine and/or simplify views to produce hierarchies, hybrids, and abstractions.The methods we use take advantage of the source code fragments underlying the views to cross-reference between parts from different views.

Two factors limit the utility of reverse engineering technology for many distributed software systems. First, with the exception of tools that support Ada and its explicit tasking constructs, reverse engineering tools fail to capture information concerning the flow of information between tasks. Second, relatively few reverse engineering tools are available for programming languages in which many older legacy applications were written (e.g., Jovial, CMS-2, and various assembly languages). We describe approaches that were developed for overcoming these limitations. In particular, we have implemented an approach for automatically extracting task flow information from a command and control system written in CMS-2. Our approach takes advantage of a small amount of externally provided design knowledge in order to recover design information relevant to the distributed nature of the target system.

Recovery of higher level "design" information and the ability to create dynamic, task adaptable software documentation is crucial to supporting a number of program understanding activities.This paper presents research that demonstrates that reverse engineering technology can be used to recover software architecture representations of source code.We have developed a framework that integrates reverse engineering technology and architectural style representations.Using the framework, analysts can recover custom, dynamic documentation to fit a variety of software analysis requirements.Our goal is to establish coherent abstractions appropriate for helping analysts to understand large software systems.We discuss a code coverage metric useful for assessing the degree of program understanding achieved.