Quality Evaluation of Structural Design in Software Reverse Engineering: A Focus on Cohesion

Software reverse engineering (SRE) plays a crucial role in contemporary software environments. Software developers may implement a system first then use SRE tools to generate design content such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. In the literature of SRE, studies majorly focus on how precisely the conversion can reflect the system; there is, however, little or no research that further looks into the quality of the converted results. Therefore, this paper presents an online knowledge-based ontological SRE system, OntRECoh, for quality evaluation of converted UML structural models. OntRECoh features a domain-specific knowledge base that focuses on cohesion design and a rule-based inference engine for computing the cohesion scores of Java-based implemented systems and providing improvement recommendations through its Web-based interface. Furthermore, OntRECoh includes both static and dynamic cohesion measures from both the design and the implementation aspects, for the evaluation to be more comprehensive and synthetic in the SRE context.