Adequate reverse engineering

Managing software maintenance projects is difficult. A manager typically has to deal with a backlog of outstanding problems, a staff battling numerous concurrent fires, and a corporate profile in which failures have high visibility and success is greeted by a deafening silence. And when a project being managed includes programs that were written by a different group or possibly a different company, there is the additional problem of trying to understand obscure foreign code. Reverse engineering is the process of comprehending software and producing a model of it at a high level of abstraction, suitable for documentation, maintenance or reengineering. How can reverse engineering be used to help solve the problem of foreign code? Reverse engineering technology has, in fact, proven useful on many projects in helping a maintenance team obtain a better understanding of the structure and functioning of a software system. But, from a manager’s point of view, there are two painful problems: it is difficult or impossible to predict how much time a reverse engineering effort will require, and there are no standards for how to evaluate the quality of the reverse engineering work the maintenance staff performs