Among human artifacts, software holds a special place. Extremely etherogeneous, rapidly changing, and all too often dismayingly unreliable, software is literally everywhere, helping us realizing opportunities never dreamt of before, pervading our lifes, and marking, for the good or the worse, one of the most distinctive aspects of our society.

Today, despite half a century of relentless efforts, software is only partially understood, and any further step towards a deeper comprehension demands for the best of our technologies and ingenuity.

Paolo Tonella and Alessandra Potrich,
Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented Code.
Springer, New York, USA. 2005.
ISBN: 0-387-40295-0

Objectives

The project aims at the development and field testing of novel approaches for the comprehension of software, as well as at the understanding of the processes through which software is born, evolves and - eventually - dies. Current trends clearly indicate Object Oriented Programming and Web Applications as two paradigms expected to have tremendous future impact. On these, the project concentrates and focuses its activities.


Current Activities

• Code Analysis:
  
  
  • Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented (OO) code. In particular, methods for the analysis of Object Oriented code (C++ andJava).
  • Development of tools for the automatic checking of coding conventions for C++;
  • Extraction and representation of Unified Model Language (UML) diagrams from code. In particular, Interaction (under testing) and State Diagram;
  
  
• Analysis and Testing of Web Applications:
  
  
  • clustering-by-content of Web site components;
  • automated tools for the synthesis of regression test cases from analysis of server logs;
  
  
• Open Source Development Process:
  
  
  • Empirical studies on the development process of a large Open Source systems.