The Reverse Engineering Notebook

Software must evolve over time or it becomes useless. Much of software production today is involved not in creating wholly new code from scratch but in maintaining and building upon existing code. Much of this code resides in old legacy software systems. Unfortunately, these systems are often poorly documented. Typically, they become more complex and difficult to understand over time. Thus, there is a need to better understand existing software systems. An approach toward this problem would be a first step toward easing changes and extending the continuous evolution of these systems. This dissertation addresses the problem by enabling continuous software understanding. There should be a base of reverse engineering abstractions that are carried forward during evolution. The proposed approach seeks to redocument existing software structure, capture the analysis decisions made, and support personal, customizable, and live perspectives of the software in an online journal called the Reverse Engineering Notebook. The premise that software reverse engineering be applied continuously through-