Creating specifications from code: Reverse‐engineering techniques

Abstract

Abstract Reverse‐engineering application codes back to the design and specification stage may entail the recreation of lost information for an application, or the extraction of new information. We describe techniques which produce abstractions in object‐oriented and functional notations, thus aiding the comprehension of the essential structure and operations of the application, and providing formal design information which may make the code much more maintainable and certainly more respectable. The two types of application considered here are (1) data processing applications written in COBOL — of primary importance owing to their predominance in present computing practice — and (2) scientific applications written in FORTRAN. These two require somewhat different abstraction approaches.