A Framework For Reverse Engineering Process1

As the 20th century draws to a close, software has become one of the major driving forces in business, government, military equipment and operations, and in academics. In the business and military sectors, we have millions of lines of old code that need to be “re-engineered ” so that they can conform to the new modern technology. One way of getting out useful information from these pile of codes is to apply the technique of reverse engineering. Reverse Engineering also supports comprehension in software maintenance, testing, and quality assurance. The aim of reverse engineering is to provide comprehensive information about the design concepts included in a program. The idea is to provide abstraction mechanisms to allow an easy understanding of the structure of the program to people without or with a minimal prior knowledge of it. Reverse engineering from “code to design ” can be carried out in two steps. First, the source code need to be analyzed detecting all the structure that may contain information for the design. Then, with this “skeletal ” information from the code, the user has t