An Overview of the State-of-The-Art Reverse Engineering Techniques

Nowadays the development without model-based approaches are hardly imaginable, because models are not only closer to human thinking but also help the communication between developers. During a long development process the initial model becames inconsistent with the code that can be synchronised manually or automatically by tools. Reverse engineering tools have been created to help developers achieving that the design and the implementation harmonize again. This work examines the importance of the model-based development and gives an overview of the state-of-the-art reverse engineering methods and tools. Round-trip engineering is a more advanced approach of software development than reverse engineering, because the changes that affect the design are made not in the code but in the model, hereby better software quality can be achieved.