Home // ICSEA 2015, The Tenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances // View article
Authors:
Kelly Garces
Edgar Sandoval
Rubby Casallas
Camilo Alvarez
Alejandro Salamanca
Sandra Pinto
Fabian Melo
Keywords: program comprehension; reverse engineering; tools; clustering algorithms; model-driven engineering; graphical editors
Abstract:
Oracle Forms is a tool for creating screens that interact with an Oracle database. It appeared in the eighties and its use spread to many IT sectors today. There are pressures that push software engineers to modernize Oracle Forms applications: obsolescence of technology, requirements of users, etc. For a straightforward modernization, it is necessary to comprehend the applications in a prior step. This paper reports preliminary results of the "Forms Modernization" project, in particular, the understanding step. In most cases, the understanding of Forms applications is a complex and time-consuming task due to several reasons: large size of applications, lack of design documentation, lack of software organization. This paper proposes a visualization process to alleviate these issues. The process takes as input static Oracle Forms code and produces as output a set of domain specific diagrams/views that ranges from high to low abstraction levels. The gist of diagrams and views is to assist engineers in a structural understanding of Oracle Forms software. The process includes algorithms for element discovery and clustering and is instrumented by means of a tool running on top of Eclipse Modeling technologies. We take advantage of four real Oracle Forms applications to illustrate the approach benefits. These applications have been provided by Asesoftware, which is the Colombian industrial partner of the project.
Pages: 86 to 95
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015
Publication date: November 15, 2015
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4235
ISBN: 978-1-61208-438-1
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Dates: from November 15, 2015 to November 20, 2015