AnSyMo, Antwerp Systems and software Modelling, is a research group at the University of Antwerp investigating foundations, techniques, methods and tools for the design, analysis and maintenance of software-intensive systems.
Today, a large part of our world and society is shaped and steered by systems and software. More or less all devices and machines use software to some extent. Add to this all the organizations, businesses and enterprises that you communicate with on a daily basis that could not function without software.
One of the courses led by AnSyMo is the master course Software Reengineering. Find below an interview with Dr. Henrique Rocha about challenges with software reengineering and the goal of the course.
The goal of the course is to become acquainted with a broad selection of principles, techniques and skills used when reengineering existing software systems. For 2 semesters this course has used CodeScene in an assignment to restructure existing software.
We suggest students to always start with CodeScene as it provides great insights on how to begin the restructuring project.
CodeScene is the recommended software for two topics, visualization and metrics. CodeScene provides several visualization options that allow the students to have a better overview of the analyzed software. The visualizations also help the students identify possible candidates for refactoring, especially the Technical Debt tab. Moreover, the complexity metrics and smells details on artifact-level shows the reasoning for the students on why such artifacts were marked as candidates for refactoring.
For readers interested in learning more about AnSyMo and their research on the increasing complexity of software intensive systems, there is more information here.
CodeScene is free for students, find more information about it here.
CodeScene is also active in an international research project with the overall goal of helping software teams strike a balance between increased development speed without sacrificing quality. Read more here or visit the project directly.