Introduction

Several studies on evaluations and comparison of reverse engineering tools have been presented in the literature[1,2,3]. These studies aim to find differences between the tools and sometimes even to rank them. In this assignment, students who are experienced software engineers but not familiar with reverse engineering tools used and analyzed four different tools: Imagix4D, Rigi, PBS, and TkSee. Before the assignment eight hours of lectures in reverse engineering were given. During the lectures both static and dynamic reverse engineering was discussed with emphasis on reverse engineering practices and tools. However, the students were not trained with the tools to be used in the assignment.

Each of the tool was analyzed by a group of two students. For comparisons, each of the group analyzed the same C program (xfig 3.2.1) [3]. The assignment contained a questionnaire included in the 'structural demo' [3] and questions concerning the usability and usefulness of the tool. Based on their analysis the students wrote a report and gave a half of an hour long presentation.

[1] M.N. Armstrong and C. Trudeau, “Evaluating Architectural Extractors”, presented at the 5th Working Conferences on Reverse Engineering (WCRE '98), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 1998.

[2] B. Bellay and H. Gall, “A Comparison of Four Reverse Engineering Tools”, presented at the 4th Working Conferences on Reverse Engineering (WCRE '97), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1997.

[3] S. Sims and M.-A. Storey,“A Structured Demonstration of Program Comprehension Tools”, presented at the Working Cnference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2000), Brisbane, Australia, 2000.

[3] M.-A. Storey, K. Wong, P. Fong, D. Hooper, K. Hopkins, and H. A. Muller, “On Designing an Experiment to Evaluate a Reverse Engineering Tool”, presented at the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'96), Monterey, CA, 1996.

[4] M.-A. Storey, K. Wong, and H. A. Muller, “How do Program Understanding Tools Affect How Programmers Understand Programs?”, presented at (WCRE '97), Amsterdam, Holland, 1997.