5 Reverse Engineering Models from Legacy Code
The automatic test-generation and execution offered by Reactis
enables engineers to easily check whether a reverse-engineered model conforms to
the behavior of legacy code.
Model-based design technology can also play an important role with regard to
legacy systems. Such systems are often poorly documented and very difficult to
modify to meet evolving system requirements due to the fragile nature of the
underlying code. It would benefit developers to have a precise and unambiguous
model of the behavior of a legacy system for which they were responsible. Such
a model would serve as a formal and executable specification of the legacy
system, thereby facilitating system maintenance, documentation, and evolution.
The focus of this section is on how Reactis can indeed be used to derive, or
“reverse engineer”, models from code.
| Figure 8: Reverse engineering models from legacy code using
Reactis. |
Figure 8 illustrates the process one would follow in order
to use Reactis to reverse engineer models from legacy code. Reverse engineering
proceeds as follows.
- The Simulink / Stateflow modeling environment is used to draft a model of
the legacy code.
- The resulting .slx file is fed into Reactis Tester which then
automatically generates a test suite from the model. The result is an
.rst file (a Reactis test-suite file). The generated test suite
thoroughly exercises the draft model according to various coverage
metrics. Example coverage metrics include Stateflow state and
transition coverage, Simulink branch coverage, and MC/DC coverage.
Tester also eliminates redundancy in the test suite it generates in order
to eliminate unnecessary test steps.
- Reactis Simulator may then be used to visualize the execution of the tests
produced by Reactis Tester, and also to fine-tune the test suite to further
improve model coverage.
- The test suite is exported as a CSV file and given as input to a test
harness to automate the process of applying the tests to the legacy code.
- By comparing the outputs produced by the software and the model on the
tests in the test suite, deviations in the behavior of the model from the legacy
code are readily detectable and can be used to guide the user in refining the
model to ensure that it faithfully captures the behavior of the legacy system.
- Reverse engineering of the model concludes when the code passes all tests
generated from the model.
The beauty of having a model to go along with a legacy system is that the model
serves as a formal and executable specification of the code, thereby easing the
tasks of code maintenance, documentation, and evolution.
