Reverse Engineering Platform Independent Models from Business Software Applications

The reasons for reverse engineering software applications could be many. These include: to understand the design of the software system to improve it for future iterations, to communicate the design to others when prior documentation is either lost or does not exist or is out-dated, to understand competitors’ product to replicate the design, to understand the details to discover patent infringements, to derive the meta model which can then be used to possibly translate the business application on to other platforms. Whatever the reasons, reverse engineering business applications is a tedious and complex technical activity. Reverse engineering a business application is not about analyzing code alone. It requires analysis of various aspects of a business application: the platform on which software runs, the underlying features of the platform that the software leverages, the interaction of a software system with other applications external to the software system being analyzed, the libraries and the components of the programming language as well as application development platforms that the business application uses etc. We argue that this context in which a business application runs is critical to analyzing it and understanding it for whatever end-use the analysis may be put to use. Much of the prior work on reverse engineering in software engineering field has focused on code analysis. Not much attention has been given in literature to understanding the context in which a business application runs from various perspectives such as the ones mentioned above. In our work we address this specific aspect of reverse engineering business applications.