Abstract

Legacy systems pose problems to maintainers that can be solved partially with effective tools. A prototype tool for determining collections of files sharing a large amount of text has been developed and applied to a 40 megabyte source tree containing two releases of the gcc compiler. Similarities in source code and documentation corresponding to software cloning, movement and inertia between releases, as well as the effects of preprocessing easily stand out in a way that immediately conveys nonobvious structural information to a maintainer taking responsibility for such a system.

Citations

429	Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy - Chikofsky, Cross - 1990
257	Efficient randomized pattern matching algorithms - Karp, Rabin - 1987
117	Design Recovery for Maintenance and Reuse - Biggerstaff - 1992
58	Identifying Redundancy in Source Code Using Fingerprints - Johnson - 1993
39	A program for identifying duplicated code - Baker - 1993
22	Investigating reverse engineering technologies for the CAS program understanding project - Buss, Mori, et al. - 1994