Search based hierarchy generation for reverse engineered state machines
Author: 
Mathew HallAuthors Info & Claims
Mathew HallAuthors Info & ClaimsSeptember 2011
Pages 392 - 395
Abstract
Abstraction is a valuable tool that can play an important role in reducing the cost of maintenance of software systems. Despite the cost reduction abstract documentation can provide, the cost of generating documentation that offers an implementation-independent overview of the system often outweighs it. This has been the motivating force for tools and techniques that reduce the cost of documentation generation, including this work.
State machines offer an ideal level of abstraction and techniques to infer them from machines are already mature. Despite this, the abstraction state machines provide is restricted as they become unmanageable when they are of any significant size. As a result, inference tools are only ideal for those who are already familiar with the system.
This work focuses on making state machines useful for larger systems. In order to do so the complexity of a machine needs to be reduced; this is realised by introducing a hierarchy to the machine, making them closer to Harel's Statechart formalism (without concurrency).
References
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H. Chu, Q. Li, S. Hu, and P. Chen. An approach for reversely generating hierarchical uml statechart diagrams. Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, pages 434--437, 2006.
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M. Hall, P. Mcminn, and N. Walkinshaw. Superstate identification for state machines using search-based clustering. Proceedings of the 12th Anuual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, pages 1381--1388, Jul 2010.
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D. Harel. Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems. Science of Computer Programming, 8:231--274, 1987.
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A. Kumar. Schaem: A method to extract statechart representation of fsms. IEE International Advance Computing Conference 2009, Jan 2009.
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T. McCabe. A complexity measure. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2(4):308--320, Jan 1976.
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K. Meffert et al. JGAP - Java Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming Package. http://jgap.sf.net.
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B. Mitchell and S. Mancoridis. On the automatic modularization of software systems using the bunch tool. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2006.
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E. Tryggeseth. Report from an experiment: Impact of documentation on maintenance. Empirical Software Engineering, Jan 1997.
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Index Terms
- Search based hierarchy generation for reverse engineered state machines
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September 2011
548 pages
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Published: 09 September 2011
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