软工专业英语 (2).pptVIP

* 2.3 REVERSE ENGINEERING What is Reverse Engineering? The Reverse Engineering Process Reverse Engineering to Understand Processing Reverse Engineering to Understand Data Reverse Engineering User Interfaces 2.3.1 What is Reverse Engineering? Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a subject system to ? Identify the system’s components and their interrelationships; ? Create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction. Reverse engineering generally involves extracting design artifacts and building or synthesizing abstractions that are less implementation-dependent. While reverse engineering often involves an existing functional system as its subject, this is not a requirement. You can perform reverse engineering starting from any level of abstraction or at any stage of the life cycle. 2. Key objectives 1) Cope with complexity. 2) Generate alternate views. 3) Recover lost information. 4) Detect side effects. 5) Synthesize higher abstractions. 6) Facilitate reuse. 2.3.2 The Reverse Engineering Process In spanning the life-cycle stages, reverse engineering covers a broad range starting from the existing implementation, recapturing or recreating the design, and deciphering the requirements actually implemented by the subject system. There are many subareas of reverse engineering. Two subareas that are widely referred to are redocumentation and design recovery. The reverse engineering process is represented in Figure 2-4. Before reverse engineering activities can commence, unstructured (“dirty”) source code is restructured so that it contains only the structured programming constructs. This makes the source code easier to read and provides the basis for all the subsequent reverse engineering activities. The core of reverse engineering is an activity called extract abstractions. You must evaluate the old program and from the (often undocumented) source code, develop a meaningful specification of the processing t