As a program evolves, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand and reason about changes in the source code. Eventually, if enough changes are made, reverse engineering and design recovery techniques must be used in order to understand the current behavior of a system. In this context, the effective use of complementary approaches can facilitate program and system understanding by taking ...

Legacy systems constitute valuable assets to the organizations that own them. However, due to the development of newer and faster hardware platforms and the invention of novel interface styles, there is a great demand for their migration to new platforms. In this paper, we present a method for reverse engineering the system interface that consists of two tasks. Based on traces of the users inte...

SUMMARY Reverse engineering is the process of extracting system abstractions and design information out of existing software systems. This process involves the identiication of software artifacts in a particular subject system, the exploration of how these artifacts interact with one another, and their aggregation to form more abstract system representations that facilitate program understandin...

Frost's critique reveals the limitations of the reverse-engineering approach to cognitive modeling--the style of psychological explanation in which a stipulated internal organization (in the form of a computational mechanism) explains a relatively narrow set of phenomena. An alternative is to view organization as both the explanation for some phenomena and a phenomenon to be explained. This mov...

Pigeons are well known for their visual capabilities as well as their ability to categorize visual stimuli at both the basic and superordinate level. We adopt a reverse engineering approach to study categorization learning: Instead of training pigeons on predefined categories, we simply present stimuli and analyze neural output in search of categorical clustering on a solely neural level. We pr...

The reverse engineering of large scale object-oriented legacy systems is a challenging task with a definite need for approaches helping to have a fast overview and to focus on the problematic parts. This paper investigates a hybrid approach, combining the immediate appeal of visualizations with the scalability of metrics. We validate our approach by showing how CodeCrawler, the experimental pla...

Surprising as it may seem, many of the early adopters of the object-oriented paradigm already face a number of problems typically encountered in large-scale legacy systems. Consequently, reverse engineering techniques are relevant in an object-oriented context as well. This paper investigates a hybrid approach, combining the immediate appeal of visualisations with the scalability of metrics. We...

Formal approaches to software reuse rely heavily upon specification matchingcriterion, where a search query using formal specifications is used to search a library of components indexed by specifications. In previous investigations, we addressed the use of formal methods and component libraries to support software reuse and construction of software based on component specifications. A difficult...

Since the 1980s, software maintenance started to attract attention. Some progress has been made in using formal methods on software maintenance, especially on reverse engineering. This paper attempts to summarise some major advances in this area over the last one and a half decades. Firstly, we introduce program transformation techniques for software development and review the techniques used f...

Given a program S and a precondition Q, the strongest postcondition, denoted sp(S;Q), is defined as the strongest condition that holds after the execution of S, given that S terminates. By defining the formal semantics of each of the constructs of a programming language, a formal specification of the behavior of a program written using the given programming language can be constructed. In this ...