A Design Space for Reengineering Environment Infrastructures

Over the last decade many research groups have been developing reengineering environments. However, many design decisions such as support for multiple models, incremental loading of information, tool integration, entity grouping, and their impacts on the underlying meta-model and resulting environment have remained implicit. Based on the experience accumulated while developing the Moose reengineering environment, we define a design space that makes explicit the different options and tradeoffs that have to be dealt with when developing such environments. Using this design space developers of future environments will have a better understanding of the problems they will be facing and the trade-offs of the design choices.