Investigating Reverse Engineering Technologies for the CAS Program Understanding Project

Corporations face mounting maintenance and re-engineering costs for large legacy systems. Evolving over several years, these systems embody substantial corporate knowledge, including requirements, design decisions, and business rules. Such knowledge is difficult to recover after many years of operation, evolution, and personnel change. To address this problem, software engineers are spending an ever-growing amount of effort on program understanding and reverse engineering technologies. This article describes the scope and results of an on-going research project on program understanding undertaken by the IBM Software Solutions Toronto Laboratory Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS). The project involves, in addition to a team from CAS, five research groups working cooperatively on complementary reverse engineering approaches. All groups are using the source code of SQL/DS (a multi-million line relational database system) as the reference legacy system. The article also discusses the approach adopted to integrate the various toolsets under a single reverse engineering environment.NRC publication: Ye