A hybrid reverse engineering approach combining metrics and program visualisation

Surprising as it may seem, many of the early adopters of the object-oriented paradigm already face a number of problems typically encountered in large-scale legacy systems. Consequently, reverse engineering techniques are relevant in an object-oriented context as well. This paper investigates a hybrid approach, combining the immediate appeal of visualisations with the scalability of metrics. We validate such a hybrid approach by showing how CodeCrawler - the experimental platform we built-allowed us to understand the program structure of and identify potential design anomalies in a public-domain software system