The ReverseAndReengineeringTaxonomy defines reverse engineering as:

The process of analyzing a subject system with two goals in mind:

1. to identify the system's components and their interrelationships; and,
2. to create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction.

Observe that reverse engineering is a process of examination only: the software system under consideration is not modified (which would make it ReEngineering).

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Reverse engineering resources include:

• The European conference on SoftwareMaintenance and ReEngineering CSMR
• The working conference on reverse engineering WCRE.
• The TcseCommitteeOnReverseAndReengineering
• The ReengineeringForum
• The Reverse Engineering Group at Georgia Tech includes links to many other research institutions around the world.

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Reverse engineering topics covered on this wiki include:

• ArchitectureExtraction
  • ClusterAnalysis
  • ConceptAnalysis
  • DesignPatternRecovery
  • ObjectIdentification
  • SwarmDagstuhl
• DeCompilation
• DocumentationGeneration
• DomainEngineering
• LegalIssues

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Many reverse engineering tools follow a three step approach:

• FactsExtraction
• Abstraction
• Presentation

One of the papers discussing this in more detail is S. Tilley, S. Paul, and D. B. Smith; Towards a Framework for Program Understanding; IWPC 1996. In this paper, these activities are also explained as

• Data Gathering
• Knowledge Organization
• Information Exploration

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And for the lighter side...

• Reverse Engineering T-Shirts
• The Domesday Book project in which reverse engineering is applied to emulate equipment in order to read data stored on obsolete video disks.

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CategoryReverseEngineering | Contributions by ArieVanDeursen