A Model Proposal For Program Comprehension

One of the principal task in the context of reverse engineering is related to program comprehension activity, that can be performed through different techniques, tools and strategies.To better understand and exploit the knowledge necessary to comprehend an existing system different models and metamodels are necessary to represent the information extracted at different levels of abstraction. In this paper we describe the model we have defined in our Marple (Metrics and Architectures Reconstruction PLug-in for Eclipse) project, whose main objectives are related to design pattern detection and to software architecture reconstruction of an existing system to support program comprehension.We introduce the architecture of the model we have proposed outlining its extensibility features and we describe the implementation of the model through the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). We are interested in using this model as the only data repository for any step of elaboration on the system.