A Review of Reverse Engineering Theories and Tools

Reverse Engineering is focused on the challenging task of understanding legacy program code without having suitable documentation. Using a transformational forward engineering perspective, the much of difficulty is caused by design decisions made during system development. Such decisions “hide” the program functionality and performance requirements in the final system by applying repeated refinements through layers of abstraction, and information-spreading optimizations, both of which change representations and force single program entities to serve multiple purposes. The demand by all business sectors to adapt their information systems to the web has created a tremendous need for methods, tools, and infrastructures to evolve and exploit existing applications efficiently and cost-effectively. Reverse engineering has become the most promising technologies to combat this legacy systems problem. Following the transformational approach we can use the transformations of a forward engineering methodology and apply them “backwards” to reverse engineer code to a more abstract specification. This paper presents reverse engineering program comprehension theories and the reverse engineering technology. Keywords–– Reverse Engineering, Forward Engineering, Code Reverse Engineering, Data Reverse Engineering