Software Engineering - Old Questions

11. What is reverse engineering? Describe reverse engineering process.

The objective of reverse engineering is to derive the design and specification of a system from its source code. It is the process of analyzing a program in an effort to create a representation of the program at a higher level of abstraction than source. The program itself is unchanged by the reverse engineering process. The software source code is usually available as the input.

Reverse engineering process:

The process starts with an analysis phase. During this phase, the system is analysed using automated tools to discover its structure. In itself, this is not enough to re-create the system design. Engineers then work with the system source code and its structural model. They add information to this which they have collected by understanding the system. This information is maintained as a directed graph that is linked to the program source code.

Information store browsers are used to compare the graph structure and the code and to annotate the graph with extra information. Documents of various types such as program and data structure diagrams and traceability matrices can be generated from the directed graph. Traceability matrices show where entities in the system are defined and referenced. The process of document generation is an iterative one as the design information is used to further refine the information held in the system repository.