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Reverse engineering and design recovery: a taxonomy
Abstract
The key to applying computer-aided software engineering to the maintenance and enhancement of existing systems lies in applying reverse-engineering approaches. However, there is considerable confusion over the terminology used in both technical and marketplace discussions. The authors define and relate six terms: forward engineering, reverse engineering, redocumentation, design recovery, restructuring, and reengineering. The objective is not to create new terms but to rationalize the terms already in use. The resulting definitions apply to the underlying engineering processes, regardless of the degree of automation applied.>
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Cited by
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Polymetric views - A lightweight visual approach to reverse engineering
Lanza, M., & Ducasse, S. (2003) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2003.1232284 · Cited by 373
Abdul Khalil, H. P. S., Davoudpour, Y., Saurabh, C. K., Hossain, M. S., Adnan, A. S., Dungani, R., Paridah, M. T., Islam Sarker, M. Z., Fazita, M. R. N., Syakir, M. I., et al. (2016) · Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.rser.2016.06.072 · Cited by 306
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Metadata
- Authors
- Chikofsky, E. J., & Cross, J. H.
- Venue
- IEEE Software
- Published
- 1990-01
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 13-17
- ISSN
- 0740-7459 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2006267758
- Cited by
- 2,012
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 101.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Reverse engineering and design recovery: a taxonomy. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/52.43044
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- Chikofsky, E. J., & Cross, J. H. (1990). Reverse engineering and design recovery: a taxonomy. IEEE Software. https://doi.org/10.1109/52.43044
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
