Abstract
Reverse engineering is the process of extracting system abstractions and design information out of existing software systems. This information can then be used for subsequent development, maintenance, re-engineering, or reuse purposes. This process involves the identification of software artifacts in a particular subject system, and the aggregation of these artifacts to form more abstract system representations. This paper describes a reverse engineering environment which uses the spatial and visual information inherent in graphical representations of software systems to form the basis of a software interconnection model. This information is displayed and manipulated by the reverse engineer using an interactive graph editor to build subsystem structures out of software building blocks. The spatial component constitutes information about how a software structure looks. The coexistence of these two representations is critical to the comprehensive appreciation of the generated data, and greatly benefits subsequent analysis, processing, and decision-making.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the Fifth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Software Development Environments |
| Subtitle of host publication | SDE 5 |
| Place of Publication | New York, NY, USA |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| Pages | 88-98 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISBN (Print) | 0897915542 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1992 |