Any response to the software maintenance challenge must address the underlying problem of program understanding. One way of doing this is through reverse engineering. A successful approach to reverse engineering must be both exible and scalable. Most reverse engineering tools provide a xed palette of analysis, extraction, organization, representation, and selection techniques. This paper descri...

We present an empirical study of the impact of design patterns on quality attributes in the context of software maintenance and evolution. Our first hypothesis verifies software engineering lore: design patterns impact software quality positively. We show that, contrary to popular beliefs, design patterns in practice impact negatively several quality attributes, thus providing concrete evidence...

Software engineering is the multi-person activity of creating multiversion software. In the model-driven methodology, software artifacts are expressed in a variety of languages with a variety of tools. To manage the inconsistencies that can arise within and between software models, one needs a means to describe consistency constraints, detect violations of these and correct the models according...