Code understanding through program transformation for reusable component identification

Code understanding is the most essential step in all post delivery software activities such as software maintenance and reuse. In the Reverse-engineering Reuse Redevelopment Assistant (R³ A), a tool aimed at providing a comprehensive approach for all post delivery software activities, code understanding has been addressed by reverse engineering through program transformation. The paper proposes a method to deal with this problem and discusses in detail how program transformation techniques, program comprehension techniques and the role of human knowledge are integrated into R³ A, i.e., how they are used during reverse engineering to recognise reusable components, and how they are used by semantic interface analysis to represent formally reusable components. The experiments conducted strongly suggest the proposed method is a practical approach to software reuse