Reverse Engineering ARoadmap

HausiMueller, JensJahnke, Dennis Smith, PeggyStorey, Scott Tilley, and KennyWong

In A, Finkelstein (ed.) The Future of Software Engineering, ACM Press, 2000. (event colocated with ICSE 2000).

Abstract

By the early 1990s the need for ReEngineering LegacySystems was already acute, but recently the demand has increased significantly with the shift toward web-based user interfaces. The demand by all business sectors to adapt their information systems to the Web has created a tremendous need for methods, tools, and infrastructures to evolve and exploit existing applications efficiently and cost-effectively. Reverse engineering has been heralded as one of the most promising technologies to combat this legacy systems problem. This paper presents a roadmap for reverse engineering research for the first decade of the new millennium, building on the ProgramUnderstanding theories of the 1980s and the ReverseEngineering technology of the 1990s.

See http://www.softwaresystems.org/reverse.html (which includes many useful references) and http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Finkelstein/fose/finalmuller.pdf