Note: This handbook was written for the first phase of this demonstration which was presented at WCRE'2001 from 2-5 October, 2001 in Stuttgart. The handbook will be updated when the next meeting milestone has been set (we are currently considering IWPC'2001 which will be held in Paris at the end of June 2002.
Participant Handbook - for a Collective Demonstration of Reverse Engineering Tools
Handbook Version: July 26, 2001.
Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey
University of Victoria
Susan Elliott Sim
University of Toronto
Kenny Wong
University of Alberta
Summary
In this collaborative demonstration of reverse engineering tools, teams of tool designers will be applying their tools to a common subject system and task, to re-architect a forestry management tool, SORTIE. This handbook describes the expected participation and contributions of the teams. Teams will be required to:- perform the reverse engineering and re-engineering tasks on SORTIE
- participate in a discussion forum during the process (to share results and promote further collaboration)
- share data or results (ideally using GXL) with at least one other team
- make your results and reports publicly available (on this or another web site)
- submit deliverables and reports to the organizers by Monday, September 17, 2001
- participate in a lively panel and discussion at WCRE'2001
- have a display in the Tools Fair at WCRE2001
These requirements will be described in detail in the remainder of this handbook. The most current version of this handbook can be found on the collaborative demonstration web
site.
Deliverables
The following deliverables must be submitted to the organisers by Monday, September 17, 2001. We need to have these materials in advance of the conference, so we can prepare an analysis of the process and the results for the panel presentations.
- Written report
- Work products
Since we have a wide variety of tools participating, we are expecting a wide variety of results. Examples of work products are visualizations, metrics, file clustering, factbase or data files to be used with a query engine or analyzer, customized scripts for your tool, converters between file formats, and modified source code. These work products should illustrate your solutions to the assigned task and substantiate your written report.
- Results of analysis
What are your solutions to the assigned tasks of assessing and proposing a new architecture for the SORTIE system?
Written Report
Section 1. Introduction
- Brief description of tool and its main functionality
- Team -- background of each team member, including education, level of experience as software developer, level of experience with tool
Section 2. Experience Report
- What steps were taken to analyze the software system?
- How much time was spent on each step?
- What difficulties were encountered?
- Were there any surprises?
In this section of the report, you should describe what happened when you tried analyzing
SORTIE with your tool. You should talk about the specific steps you took and the abstract reverse engineering or re-engineering approach you followed. One way to help describe your abstract process is to look at the assumptions you make, for example, about the types of
subject systems that your tool is suitable for, heuristics that you used when generating your output or doing your analysis.
Section 3. Collaboration Partners
- Identify peer tools
- Identify complementary tools
- What other tool teams did you work with?
- What did you have to do to make your tools work together?
- What lessons were learn about tool interoperability?
Peer tools are ones that offer similar functionality to yours, while complementary tools offer different functionality that may be used in tandem with your tool. When you work with another tool team, both partners should ideally write up their experiences. Describe also other tools you used that were not directly part of the collaboration tool demonstration.
Section 4. Solution to tasks
Based on the analysis that you performed using your tool with or without the collaboration
of anyone else's tool, what can you say about the SORTIE system? These are your discoveries, recommendations, and remediations of the SORTIE system. hat is the existing architecture of the SORTIE system? What should the architecture of the new system be?
Format of Report
Please use the formatting found in this page (i.e. in HTML) so that we can easily post the results on this website. If this is really not possible, please provide PDF or
PostScript.
Participation at WCRE 2001
- Demo at Tools Fair
We do not yet have details regarding the organisation of the Tools Fair at WCRE. We will make these available once they are known.
- Presentation and Panel
The format of the presentation has yet to be determined because it will largely depend what results are produced by the study as a whole. Each team will have an opportunity to present, however, they may be required to co-ordinate their presentation with other teams.