Shimba - an environment for reverse engineering Java software systems

Shimba is a reverse engineering environment to support the understanding of Java software systems. Shimba integrates the Rigi and SCED tools to analyz e and visualize the static and dynamic aspects of a subject system, The sta tic software artifacts and their dependencies are extracted from Java byte code and viewed as directed graphs using the Rigi reverse engineering envir onment, The run-time information is generated by running the target softwar e under a customized SDK debugger. The generated information is viewed as s equence diagrams using the SCED tool, In SCED, statechart diagrams can be s ynthesized automatically from sequence diagrams, allowing the user to inves tigate the overall run-time behavior of objects in the target system, Shimba provides facilities to manage the different diagrams and to trace ar tifacts and relations across views. In Shimba, SCED sequence diagrams are u sed to slice the static dependency graphs produced by Rigi, In turn, Rigi g raphs are used to guide the generation of SCED sequence diagrams and to rai se their level of abstraction, We show how the information exchange among t he views enables goal-driven reverse engineering tasks and aids the overall understanding of the target software system, The FUJABA software system se rves as a case study to illustrate and validate the Shimba reverse engineer ing environment, Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.