Improving reverse‐engineering through the use of multiple knowledge sources

Abstract

With the growing awareness of the importance of software maintenance has come a re-evaluation of software maintenance tools. Such tools range from source code analysers to semi-intelligent tools which seek to reconstruct system designs and specification documents from source code. However, it is clear that relying solely upon source code as a basis for reverse-engineering has many problems.These problems include poor abstraction, which leads to over-detailed specification models and the inability to link other parts of a software system, such as documentation and user expertise, to the underlying code.This paper describes the work of the Esprit DOCKET project which has developed a prototype environment to support the development of a system model linking user-oriented, business aspects of a system, to operational code using a variety of knowledge source inputs: code, documents and user expertise. The aim is to provide a coherent model to form the basis for system understanding and to support the software change and evolution process.

User-Centred Requirements Engineering

“…Programmers are notoriously bad documentors so the analyst is often left with just the code itself. The research area of reverse engineering (for overviews see Layzell, Freeman and Benedusi, 1995) deals with this problem of restructuring old code to make it more maintainable and reliable. If the code is welldesigned with a modular structure then there is some chance of success that the original designer's intentions might be discernible; however, most old code has as much structure as a plate of spaghetti, so reverse engineering requirements can be a forlorn task.…”

Reverse Engineering

“…• Design recovery -The objective of this research area is to get a design description out of the source code [20,24,25]. There are two strategies to achieve this [39,40,41,49,67,70,77].…”

“…Other approaches are to develop reasoning techniques, e.g., classic reasoning [1,5,38,47,76] and inductive reasoning [23]. New control strategies were also introduced for efficiency, e.g., bottom-up [8,38,49], top-down [8], dynamic programming/hybrid search [47] and flexible/multi-purpose application [79]. Recently, we also see some efforts to tackle the uncertainty issues inherent in the domain knowledge recovery process from code [50].…”

Extracting business rules from source code

“…Layzell, Freeman and Benedusi have reinforced this approach by requesting that reverse engineering be improved by using multiple knowledge sources such as user domain knowledge, documentation and testing as well as the source itself [25]. Quilici and Chen follow the same line in their DECODE Reverse Engineering System which is query based.…”