REVERSE ENGINEERING

REVERSE ENGINEERING

ABSTRACT:

At initial stage, software engineering research has focused primarily on software construction, neglecting software maintenance and evolution. The need for maintaining and improving software systems has risen dramatically over the past decade. Dealing with old software systems, which constitute billion-dollar assets to corporations and governments, has been recognized as a critical problem by industry, academia, and entrepreneurs. As a result, interest in software re-engineering technologies, and in particular technologies for understanding software, has exploded. Re-engineering involves capturing, preserving, and extracting knowledge about software, analyzing and understanding software, and finally changing, improving, and evolving software. Re-engineering approaches have been particularly useful in the re-engineering area. Observed is a shift in research from synthesis to analysis.

The process of reverse engineering is concerned with the analysis of existing software systems to make them more understandable for maintenance, re-engineering, and evolution purposes. Reverse engineering is the process of generating new information about software such as synthesizing abstractions and generating different views. It involves the identification of software artifacts in the subject and the aggregation of these artifacts to form more abstract system representations. The process of reverse engineering is introduced as an aid in program understanding which tries to pattern matching between the set of known plans (or mental models) and source code of the subject software.

The primary purpose of the paper is to review the state-of-the-art the program understanding with particular focus on reverse engineering technologies in the context of software maintenance and evolution of software systems. The secondary purpose of the paper deals with reverse engineering tools.

for more info visit.
http://www.enjineer.com/forum