MDA-Based Reverse Engineering

The most known definition of reverse engineering was given by Chikofsky and Cross (1990): “the process of analyzing a subject system to (i) identify the system’s components and their interrelationships and (ii) create representations of the system in another form or at a higher-level of abstraction”. Reverse engineering is the process of discovering and understanding software artifacts or systems with the objective of extracting information and providing high-level views of them that can be later on manipulated or re-implemented. That is to say, it is the processes of examination, not a process of change such as forward engineering and reengineering. Forward engineering is the traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and implementation-independent designs to the physical implementation of a system. On the other hand, software reengineering includes a reverse engineering phase in which abstractions of the software artifacts to be reengineered are built, and a forward engineering phase that moves from abstractions to implementations (Sommerville, 2004) (Canfora &Di Penta, 2007).