Columbus - Tool for Reverse Engineering Large Object Oriented Software Systems

One of the most critical issues in large-scale software development and maintenance is the rapidly growing size and complexity of the software systems. As a result of this rapid growth there is a need to understand the relationships between the different parts of a large system. In this paper we present a reverse engineering framework called Columbus that is able to analyze large C/C++ projects. Columbus supports project handling, data extraction, -representation, -storage and -export. Efficient filtering methods can be used to produce comprehensible diagrams from the extracted information. The flexible architecture of the Columbus system (based on plug-ins) makes it a really versatile and an easily extendible tool for reverse engineering.