Development and Application of Reverse Engineering Measures in a Re-engineering Tool

If software metrics are useful in a forward software engineering environment, they are vital in a reverse engineering one. We are endeavouring to develop suitable metrics for software engineers who urgently need them for reverse engineering legacy systems. We propose that the metrics for reverse engineering in our re-engineering tool, the Re-engineering Assistant (RA), are developed under five categories: complexity, abstractness, object orientation, economics and reusability. The main task of reverse engineering is to extract a representation of existing systems at a high level of abstraction. This main characteristic is reflected in our study. Complexity measures are used to indicate how complex it is to reverse engineer a piece of existing code. Abstractness measures indicate at what level of abstraction the existing code is and whether the code is abstract enough to understand. Object orientation measures indicate how object oriented the code is for those re-engineers who are hoping to transform myriad conventional procedural systems into object-oriented ones via reverse engineering. Economics (cost estimation) measures indicate the cost to reverse engineer the existing code. Reusability measures indicate to what extent the reverse engineered existing code can be reused. Several measures under each of the above categories have been developed or adopted, and “justified” in this study. Examples are also presented.