The Bauhaus project is a software research project collaboration among the University of Stuttgart, the University of Bremen, and a commercial spin-off company Axivion, also known as Bauhaus Software Technologies.

The Bauhaus project serves the fields of software maintenance and software reengineering.

Created in response to the problem of software rot,Holger Bruns. "Rolle rückwärts: 'Reverse Engineering' deckt Schwachstellen in der Softwarentwicklung auf." Deutschlandfunk (Radio Germany). 08.07.2006. the project aims to analyze and recover the means and methods developed for legacy software by understanding the software's architecture.Tullio Vardanega. Reliable software technology - Ada-Europe 2005:10th Ada-Europe International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, York, UK, June 20 - 24, 2005, proceedings. Volume 3555 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2005. , As part of its research, the project develops software tools (such as the Bauhaus Toolkit) for software architecture, software maintenance and reengineering and program understanding.Quigley, Aaron J. Large Scale Relational Information Visualization, Clustering, and Abstraction , pp. 155-159. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Newcastle, August, 2001.

The project derives its name from the former Bauhaus art school.

History The Bauhaus project was initiated by Profs. Erhard Ploedereder and Rainer Koschke at the University of StuttgartKeynote Speakers - WCRE 2005 Working Conference on Reverse Engineering in 1996. It was originally a collaboration between the Institute for Computer Science (ICS) of the University of Stuttgart and the , which is no longer involved.

The Bauhaus project was funded by the state of Baden-Württemberg, the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, T-Nova Deutsche Telekom Innovationsgesellschaft Ltd., and Xerox Research."Bauhaustechniken – höhere Produktivität bei Wartungsingenieuren durch „Corporate Memory“" do it.software-award:Ausgezeichnete Softwareforschung aus Baden-Württemberg 2003–2007 . Page 42.

Early versions of Bauhaus integrated and used Rigi for visualization.

The commercial spin-off Axivion GmbH, headquartered in Stuttgart, was started in 2005.Jochen Quante. Dynamic Object Process Graphs (Dissertation) Universität Bremen. 30 January 2009 Research then was done at Axivion, the Institute of Software Technology, Department of Programming Languages at the University of Stuttgart as well as at the Software Engineering Group of the Faculty 03 at the University of Bremen.

Formerly, the academic version of the "Bauhaus" was offered. Today, the software product is sold commercially as Axivion Suite. The latter includes MISRA C checks among other verification services.

On August 11, 2022, the Qt Group acquired Axivion GmbH. Since then, the Axivion Suite has been further developed and distributed by the Qt Group's Quality Assurance business unit.

Bauhaus Toolkit now Axivion Suite The Bauhaus Toolkit (or simply the "Bauhaus tool") includes a static code analysis tool for C, C++, C#, Java and Ada code. It comprises various analyses such as architecture checking, interface analysis, and clone detection. Bauhaus was originally derived from the older Rigi reverse engineering environment,Holger Kienle and Xiaomin Wu REPORT FOR THE SORTIE STRUCTURED TOOL DEMONSTRATION. Technical report, University of Victoria, 2001. which was expanded by Bauhaus due to the Rigi's limitations. It is considered one of the most notable visualization tools in the field.

The Bauhaus tool suite aids the analysis of source code by creating abstractions (representations) of the code in an intermediate language as well as through a resource flow graph (RFG).Karsten Sohr and Bernhard Berger. "Idea: Towards Architecture-Centric Security Analysis of Software." Engineering Secure Software and Systems: Second International Symposium, ESSoS 2010, Pisa, Italy, February 3-4, 2010, Proceedings. Volume 5965 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS sublibrary. SL 4, Security and cryptology Security and Cryptology. Springer, 2010. , The RFG is a hierarchal graph with typed nodes and edges, which are structured in various views.

While the Axivion Suite has its origins in the Bauhaus project, it is now considered a different product with a broader range of services, such as static code analyses, such as MISRA checking, architecture verification, include analysis, defect detection, and clone management.

Reception The Bauhaus tool suite has been used successfully in research and commercial projects. It has been noted that Bauhaus is "perhaps [the] most extensive" customization of the well-known Rigi environment,Holger M. Kienle and Muller, Hausi A. The Rigi Reverse Engineering Environment. University of Victoria, Canada. 2008.

The members of the project were repeatedly awarded with Best Paper Awards and were invited to submit journal papers several times.

In 2003, the Bauhaus project received the do it software award from MFG Stiftung Baden-Württemberg.

Footnotes Regarding the project's founding, the years 1996 and 1997 seem to appear equally often among the various sources.

References

External links The Bauhaus Project – Former project page at ISTE