Adoption of reverse engineering tools: a cognitive perspective and methodology

Reverse engineering tools aimed at facilitating software maintenance suffer from low adoption. Many are developed but few are used by software engineers in performing their maintenance work. We introduce an approach for tool design that is aimed at increasing the adoptability potential of tools. Our approach is based on applying cognitive analysis to identify cognitive overloads during software maintenance. A software solution is developed to target the cognitive difficulties in order to alleviate the overloads. The approach is described in the context of the implementation of a reverse engineering tool we call DynaSee. DynaSee is a tool that processes and visualises routine traces. We describe how DynaSee addresses a specific set of cognitive difficulties.