Software reverse engineering

Introduction Reverse engineering aims at obtaining high level representations of programs. Reverse engineers typically start with a low level representation of a system (such as binaries, plain source code, or execution traces), and try to distill more abstract representations from these (such as, for the examples just given, source code, architectural views, or use cases, respectively). Reverse engineering methods and technologies play an important role in many software engineering tasks, such as program comprehension, system migrations, and software evolution.