A Programmable Analysis and Transformation Framework for Reverse Engineering

Reverse Engineering refers to understanding an existing software system, and documenting the understanding in a desired format. Depending upon the purpose, which can be problem diagnosis, impact analysis, functional enhancements, or re-engineering to newer technologies or newer design, the reverse engineering artifacts vary in their definition, the abstraction level, and contents. Current state of practice relies on pre-cast tools, which extract a set of pre-defined information, with little or no inputs from the analyst. We propose a specification-based approach that allows analyst to specify and control the contents and abstraction level of the reverse engineering artifacts, while allowing user-interaction during extraction.