Charon: a tool for code redocumentation and re-engineering

The maintenance of applications constitutes the most relevant issue of the overall life cycle activities. CASE tools claim to be effective in producing efficient and error free software, but usually the maintainer doesn´t want to produce new system applications, but just to modify the existing ones. Re-engineering appears to be a suitable way of getting the advantages of the automated CASE tools, without facing the costs involved in a complete redevelopment of the existing systems, whose specifications are sometimes obsolete and no more corresponding to the actual version of the software. The authors present a totally automatic approach towards the reconstruction of the software documentation and possible code re-engineering. They move from the source code by using a static code analyser and capture information pertinent to higher level design phases that are subsequently imported into the ADW CASE tool