Reverse Engineering of Legacy Systems: A Path Toward Success

This paper addresses the question of whether the re-verse engineering of legacy systems is doomed to fail-ure. Our position is that the answer is highly depen-dent on the specific goals of the reverse engineering process. We argue that while most reverse engineer-ing efforts may well fail to achieve the traditional goal of automatically extracted complete specifica-tions suitable for forward engineering, they are likely to succeed on the more modest goal of automatically extracting partial specifications that can augmented by system-assisted human understanders.