A Practical Program Transformation System for Reverse Engineering

Program transformation systems provide one means of formally deriving a program from its speciication. The main advantage of this development method is that the executable program is correct by construction. In this paper we describe a tool called ReForm which is designed to address the inverse problem to support the extraction of a speciication from existing program code, using transformations. This is an important activity during software maintenance. One of the problems of transformation systems is the scarcity of practical tools which can address industrial scale problems, rather than contrived laboratory toyy problems. The main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the important software engineering factors that contribute to a successful transformation based tool. Results from using the tool are also presented .