Exploring the limits of domain model recovery

P. Klint, D. Landman, J.J. Vinju

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
14 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We are interested in re-engineering families of legacy applications towards using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). Is it worth to invest in harvesting domain knowledge from the source code of legacy applications? Reverse engineering domain knowledge from source code is sometimes considered very hard or even impossible. Is it also difficult for "modern legacy systems"? In this paper we select two open-source applications and answer the following research questions: which parts of the domain are implemented by the application, and how much can we manually recover from the source code? To explore these questions, we compare manually recovered domain models to a reference model extracted from domain literature, and measured precision and recall. The recovered models are accurate: they cover a significant part of the reference model and they do not contain much junk. We conclude that domain knowledge is recoverable from "modern legacy" code and therefore domain model recovery can be a valuable component of a domain re-engineering process.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, September 22-28, 2013, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Place of PublicationPiscataway
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Pages120-129
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes
Eventconference; 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance; 2013-09-22; 2013-09-28 -
Duration: 22 Sept 201328 Sept 2013

Conference

Conferenceconference; 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance; 2013-09-22; 2013-09-28
Period22/09/1328/09/13
Other29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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