Software reengineering toolkit with tangible interface by haptics

Software reengineering is an important task for software maintenance and improvement. Several metrics are proposed for evaluating software programs, and the toolkits which evaluate the software using the metrics are developed. The tool should be easy to understand, easy to modify the programs, enjoyable to use, and must be effective. We developed the 3D visualized toolkit for software reengineering providing various tangible user interfaces with haptics. The toolkit decomposes the java source program into small classes, and integrates them into the harmonized program using haptic device. The decomposed classes can be given the sound, colour and vibration attributes that can be touched and perceived, and can be merged into another classes by moving the arm of the haptic device. This paper describes the toolkit which uses the haptic device for program reorganization providing various tangible user interfaces. Software reengineering methodology is proposed, and some experiments are performed and the results are presented.