Using Excel and PowerPoint to build a reverse engineering tool
Date
2008-04-10T05:56:49Z
Authors
Yang, Fang.
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Abstract
This thesis introduces a new reverse engineering tool development practice by presenting the development of PowerExcelRigi, a reverse engineering tool built by leveraging Rigi and two selected host tools, PowerPoint and Excel. PowerPoint and Excel, both components of the Microsoft Office Suite, were selected as the host tools for this project because of their large user base, excellent enduser programmability and strong visualization capabilities. The original Rigi reverse engineering tool is used as the backend data engine to make use of its graph computing capabilities. Using PowerExcelRigi, users appreciate the familiar user interface of Excel and PowerPoint and at the same time benefit from the efficiency of Rigi. A custom toolbar in Excel provides a means to perform several reverse engineering tasks. This toolbar follows the standard Office user interface design and seamlessly integrates reverse engineering tasks into the Office environment. Reverse engineering tasks implemented include reusing given program artifacts from Rigi format program fact files, analyzing the artifacts and visualization the analysis results by using Excel, and then reproducing Rigi graphs in PowerPoint. Some Rigi scripts demonstrating typical Rigi functionality have been executed entirely through the Office interface without noticeably using Rigi. Excel and Rigi use a loose, file-based data interchange method to interoperate with each other. In comparison to a new tool with a dedicated user interface, PowerExcelRigi offers users the benefit of the cognitive support derived from their familiarity with the host tool, which decreases the learning barrier to using the new tool. This approach will ... 111 help solve the low adoption problem suffered by many reverse engineering tools. At the same time, development cost is significantly reduced by reusing Rigi, Excel and Powerpoint as existing components. We believe this to be a promising direction for the development of lower-cost, more adoptable low reverse engineering tools.