GNIREENIGNE: Reverse Engineering or Backwards Engineering?

Reverse engineering involves extracting high-level information from existing code. Reverse engineering is a crucial part of software maintenance since a maintainer needs to understand the code before attempting any modification. Many efforts have been made to automatically extract higher-level design information from the code to facilitate various maintenance activities. But many of them are limited to extracting and providing only static information like call graphs, and normally involve techniques like parsing. Some of them also try to "understand" the program in a limited toy domain so that it can generate a high-level description of the system in terms of the common programming concepts. Also, most of the systems do not have any knowledge of the domain. Only recently people have realized the limitations of current approaches and have begun advocating systems that will provide descriptions in terms of human-oriented domain concepts. This paper proposes a new approach to reverse engi..