what is reverse enginering ?👿

[yolopieti]

Reverse Engineering is a process of recovering the design, requirement specifications and functions of a product from an analysis of its code. It builds a program database and generates information from this.

The purpose of reverse engineering is to facilitate the maintenance work by improving the understandability of a system and to produce the necessary documents for a legacy system.

Reverse Engineering Goals:

• Cope with complexity.
• Recover lost information.
• Detect side effects.
• Synthesise higher abstraction.
• Facilitate Reuse.

Steps of Software Reverse Engineering:

1. Collection Information:
   This step focuses on collecting all possible information (i.e., source design documents etc.) about the software.
2. Examining the information:
   The information collected in step-1 as studied so as to get familiar with the system.
3. Extracting the structure:
   This step concerns with identification of program structure in the form of structure chart where each node corresponds to some routine.
4. Recording the functionality:
   During this step processing details of each module of the structure, charts are recorded using structured language like decision table, etc.
5. Recording data flow:
   From the information extracted in step-3 and step-4, set of data flow diagrams are derived to show the flow of data among the processes.
6. Recording control flow:
   High level control structure of the software is recorded.
7. Review extracted design:
   Design document extracted is reviewed several times to ensure consistency and correctness. It also ensures that the design represents the program.
8. Generate documentation:
   Finally, in this step, the complete documentation including SRS, design document, history, overview, etc. are recorded for future use.