June 8, 2004
McDonnell Douglas Auditorium, University of California, Irvine

Labeling as a Way of Abstracting a Software System

Poster

Student: Vladimir Jakobac

Advisor: Nenad Medvidovic

Co-Researcher: Alexander Egyed, Teknowledge Corporation

Abstract: Obtaining a representation of "as implemented" architecture of a
software system aids in reasoning about the system. Various representations can be used to describe successive levels of system's abstractions. Incited by Perry and Wolf's observation that elements of a software system are either processing, data, or connecting, we have adopted a classification approach to providing an initial system's abstraction. Our approach is based on both semantic and structural analysis rules, where various design and implementation level constructs are used to classify and then label the system's elements (e.g., classes) into three major categories. The obtained representation can then be used as a basis for a next level abstraction activity, such as clustering.

Bio: Vladimir Jakobac is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His research interests include software architectures, reverse engineering with emphasis on architecture recovery, and middleware technologies.