| Felix Lösch
| creator |
Lösch, Felix
| | date |
2005-03-16
| | | | description |
114 pages
| |
In this thesis we describe an approach and introduce a new tool,
called JDeTEx, to extract decision tables from Java programs in
order to give the maintenance engineer a better understanding of the
control flow of the program. Decision tables are a compact, yet
precise way to model the control flow of computer programs. In order
to extract the decision tables the explicit and implicit control
flow of Java programs needs to be analyzed by the tool. Firstly, the
tool uses static byte code analysis to automatically extract
information about polymorphic method calls that represent implicit
control flow in Java programs. Secondly, the tool uses source code
analysis to extract information about explicit control flow in the
Java program.
The main contribution of this thesis is an approach to instrument
Java programs in order to extract decision tables from programs. We
use the information extracted during byte code and source code
analysis to guide the instrumentation process and show that the
instrumentation does not change the execution behavior of the
original program. The instrumented program is executed in order to
extract the program path which can then be used to construct the
decision tables.
We can conclude that the use of decision tables during the
maintenance phase of a project reduces the time to understand a
program, especially when a lot of implicit control flow in form of
polymorphism is present in the program.
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application/pdf
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