Pattern-Driven Reverse Engineering

A fundamental weakness of conventional reverse engineering approaches is the lack of support in identifying program structures and recurring patterns. The integration of human domain knowledge represented via patterns can significantly improve design recovery results. The recognition of a program’s design leads to recurring patterns that, at present, have to be identified in demanding tasks by a human engineer without automated assistance. In this paper we present extensions to our reverse engineering approach based on various design recovery patterns that can be used in further automating such demanding tasks. The design recovery patterns are defined according to several factors we consider to be essential in the reverse engineering process. Based on these influence factors we show the integration of such patterns in our reverse engineering approach and define the notion of pattern-driven reverse engineering. The implications of pattern-driven reverse engineering and the improvements to be achieved for program understanding are discussed for each kind of patterns in turn. in: Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE ’95) Rockville, Maryland, June, 1995