Improving fact extraction of framework-based software systems

Modern software frameworks provide a set of common and prefabricated software artifacts that support engineers in developing large-scale software systems. Framework-related information can be implemented in source code, comments or configuration files, but in the latter two cases, current reverse engineering approaches miss important facts reducing the quality of subsequent analysis tasks. We introduce a generic fact extraction approach for framework-based systems by combining traditional parsing with lexical pattern matching to obtain framework-specific facts from all three sources. We evaluate our approach with an industrial software application that was built using the Avalon/Phoenix framework. In particular we give examples to point out the benefits of considering framework-related information and reflect experiences made during the case study.