A Framework for Classifying and Comparing Software Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery Techniques

Several techniques have been suggested for supporting reverse engineering and design recovery activities. While many of these techniques have been cataloged in various collections and surveys, the evaluation of the corresponding support tools has focused primarily on their usability and supported source languages, mostly ignoring evaluation of the appropriateness of the by-products of a tool for facilitating particular types of maintenance tasks. In this paper, we describe criteria that can be used to evaluate tool by-products based on semantic quality, where the semantic quality measures the ability of a by-product to convey certain behavioral information. We use these criteria to review, compare, and contrast several representative tools and approaches.