Structural Redocumentation: A Case Study

Documentation has traditionally played a key role as an aid in program understanding. However, most documentation is \in-the-small," describing the program at the algorithm and data structure level. For large, legacy software systems, one needs \in-the-large" documentation describing the high-level structural aspects of the software system's architecture from multiple perspectives. One way of producing such structural documentation for existing software systems is to use reverse engineering technologies. This paper describes a case study in structural redocumentation: an analysis of SQL/DS (a multi-million line relational database system) using a exible reverse engineering approach developed as part of the Rigi project.