Automatic Extraction of Abstract Components for supporting Model-driven Development of Components

Model-Driven Development(MDD) helps developers verify requirements and design issues of a software system in the early stage of development process by taking advantage of a software model which is the most highly abstracted form of a software system. In practice, however, many software systems have been developed through a code-centric method that builds a software system bottom-up rather than top-down. So, without support of appropriate tools, it is not easy to introduce MDD to real development process. Although there are many researches about extracting a model from code to help developers introduce MDD to code-centrically developed system, most of them only extracted base-level models. However, using concept of abstract component one can continuously extract higher level model from base-level model. In this paper we propose a practical method for automatic extraction of base level abstract component from source code, which is the first stage of continuous extraction process of abstract component, and validate the method by implementing an extraction tool based on the method. Target code chosen is the source code of TinyOS, an operating system for wireless sensor networks. The tool is applied to the source code of TinyOS, written in nesC language.