Talk:Rigi (software)

Discussion

For the sake of not repeating myself, discussion takes place at User talk:Jimbo Wales. JMP EAX (talk) 11:31, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Sources

I'm not going to edit war over it, but K.K. Aggarwal; Yogesh Singh (2005). Software Engineering. New Age International. p. 460. ISBN 8122416381. does not seem obviously unreliable. New Age International [1] is a large Indian technical publisher, not an Italian diploma mill. The authors appear to have respectable academic appointments at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University. Deltahedron (talk) 22:12, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

I note that CSMR 2004: Eighth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering : proceedings : 24-26 March, 2004, Tampere, Finland. IEEE Computer Society. 2004. p. 88. ISBN 076952107X. has also been deleted with the edit summary "not sure exactly what that is supposed to help with (we know it has citations)". The answer to the question is that I added both of those references to support the claim "Rigi is an interactive graph editor tool for software reverse engineering" which was at the time I made it the only explanation of what the software actually is to be found in the article.

One of the references deleted had the advantage of being independent, ie not by the software originator. I'll reinsert in the absence of an explanation here. Deltahedron (talk) 09:26, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Re: "I'm not going to edit war over it". Well you did, but you might be right about it. It seems it's only a name coincidence with New Age International University, but that is an Indian-Italian mill, not merely Italian as you say. The Italian bit is just a front. But the book Aggarwal you re-addded does have very few holdings in libraries via worldcat.org, like I said in my edit summary. I think it would be enough to add these citations to the AfD page. Rigi does have some 60 citations for at least one of their papers. Are you planning to add all of them here? They just overwhelm the reader with sources of dubious relevance that he or she doesn't really need to look at, especially since you've added them not inline. Most are going to be just passing mentions. While we're at it there's another book The China Information Technology Handbook , which is actually published by a better known publisher, Springer, which has a similar blurb to the one from Aggarwal, but I have to say the quality of that book doesn't inspire much confidence in Springer's standards lately... And most of these citations don't actually provide any independent commentary. They're just reproducing the blurb from Rigi's authors that can be found in its own papers. JMP EAX (talk) 13:33, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

An while we're at it, please bother to provide author names and paper title, not just conference proceedings name and page. Based on the google snippet you linked to, we have no fucking idea if that CSMR 2004 paper is independent or not. It turns out that the paper in question is doi:10.1109/CSMR.2004.1281409 so it is indeed independent. JMP EAX (talk) 13:36, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Please do not swear at your fellow editors like that. Since I provided an explanation of my reinsertion here, and gave other editors a chance to discuss it, I do not think I was edit warring. Since I did provide the full citation including DOI you quote for the CSMR 2004 paper, in this edit, I fail to understand why you criticise me for not doing so. However, the purpose of this talk page is to comment on content, not on contributors. Deltahedron (talk) 15:24, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

It had no doi when I removed it [2]; it was hard for me to figure out why that page in particular was important, because the citation was not added inline. An I've actually replaced with the most up-to-date paper I could find, from its developers. JMP EAX (talk) 19:17, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

More relevantly, the reason I was unsure that the CSMR2004 paper was independent was that one of its authors, K. Wong, has the same name as a member of the Rigi research group, the author of the Rigi manual. However if you are sure that the paper is indeed independent, so much the better. Deltahedron (talk) 15:34, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Fair point. I didn't notice that. But I wonder why you though adding a 4th non-independent paper (which only covered the topic rather briefly) helped... Was the purpose of the software not stated clearly enough in any of the other 3 papers that were already cited? The 1996 one, under which you added that CSMR2004 paper, says on its first page: "The Rigi reverse engineering system is designed to extract, navigate, an1alyze, and document the static structure of large software systems (to aid software maintenance and reengineering activities)." And on the 2nd page "The Rigi system is centered around a language-independent graph editor for presenting software artifacts." JMP EAX (talk) 19:17, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Aside

IF you really need me to explain why that New Age International textbook is of low quality, look no further than the beginning of the "9.6.3" section on same very page were they summarize Rigi. What do we get as introduction there: "Rugauber [cite] identifies the following four basic components of a reverse engineering tool. (1) The Restructurer detects poorly structured code fragments and replaces them by equivalent structured code. [the rest don't even matter]" Maybe Rugauber's tool does that, but is that the first and foremost job a reverse engineering tool, in general?? Because that's the introductory remark, there in the very first paragraph that's supposed to introduce the notion of reverse engineering to the student. Maybe the gov't of Dehli really thinks highly of their Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, as our wiki article says. But that textbook, written by the dean of their IT program is horrible by any out-of-Dehli standards. I shudder at the poor students at that uni who probably have to use their guru's confusing textbook... JMP EAX (talk) 20:19, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

It appears to be consistent with the description of reverse engineering on p.458 of the book. Are you suggesting that the book is not a reliable source? That is, are you saying it has not been peer-reviewed or edited by a well-regarded academic publisher? Or are you saying you would teach it differently? Evidence would be helpful. I have no reason to believe that Delhi software engineering standards are lower than out-of-Delhi standards. Deltahedron (talk) 21:07, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

I haven't read the whole book, nor do I plan to do so, but that section is basically a cargo cult pastiche of paper abstracts and inappropriate generalizations. A huge area of reverse engineering is concerned with malware analysis these days. According to that guru's textbook, the first goal of a reverser is [always] to improve the code that he is reversing [by structuring it]. Which is of course complete nonsense. Like I said before, the book has very few holdings in the academic libraries listed in Worldcat, and probably for a good reason. Good luck finding a book review for it in an academic journal, as most reputable textbooks have. 188.27.81.64 (talk) 19:33, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

I've added back the link to Rational Rose

It's specifically mentioned in a sentence right before Rigi in doi:10.1002/smr.270, and RR can also do source-based reverse engineering (i.e. from source to diagrams), as detailed in this book for example. That survey paper also mentions Borland Together, but I'm not sure if that tool can do reverse engineering, although I suspect it probably can. JMP EAX (talk) 16:24, 27 July 2014 (UTC)