A Survey of Reverse Engineering and Program Comprehension

Details A Survey of Reverse Engineering and Program Comprehension A Survey of Reverse Engineering and Program Comprehension

2005-03-24

arxiv.org/abs/cs/0503068v1

Computer Science

Software Engineering

originally released as web-only in 1996

Scientific paper

Reverse engineering has been a standard practice in the hardware community for some time. It has only been within the last ten years that reverse engineering, or "program comprehension", has grown into the current sub-discipline of software engineering. Traditional software engineering is primarily focused on the development and design of new software. However, most programmers work on software that other people have designed and developed. Up to 50% of a software maintainers time can be spent determining the intent of source code. The growing demand to reevaluate and reimplement legacy software systems, brought on by the proliferation of clientserver and World Wide Web technologies, has underscored the need for reverse engineering tools and techniques. This paper introduces the terminology of reverse engineering and gives some of the obstacles that make reverse engineering difficult. Although reverse engineering remains heavily dependent on the human component, a number of automated tools are presented that aid the reverse engineer.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

A Survey of Reverse Engineering and Program Comprehension does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with A Survey of Reverse Engineering and Program Comprehension, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and A Survey of Reverse Engineering and Program Comprehension will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-586722