Abstract

With the ever increasing complexity of software systems programmers face new challenges in comprehending the structures of these programs, their artefacts, and the behavioural relationships among these artefacts. While modeling languages and notations that were introduced to support the forward engineering process have been quite effective in abstracting the underlying information, these techniques have failed when applied in a reverse engineering context. One reason for the failure is the information overload due to the level of detail available at the source code and a lack of appropriate filtering and analysis techniques. Another limitation of the current approaches is the conceptual gap that exists between the models created during the forward and reverse engineering process. This occurs because the reverse engineered model cannot convey the information and justification behind the architecture chosen. This gap is particularly noticeable when one considers the differences in layout, grouping and organization between the original and reverse engineered models. This thesis attempts to addresses these issues, by introducing a 3D extension of UML (Unified Modelling Language) diagrams to support the visualization of recovered design patterns from source code. The goal is to provide additional guidance during program comprehension. In addition, new viewing techniques are proposed to facilitate the navigation and filtering of the information in the three dimensional world