Estudo sobre engenharia reversa e avaliação da usabilidade de ferramentas case para engenharia reversa de software

Abstract

The growth of the software market has leading to an increasing use of development techniques, which are, sometimes, informal ones. The maintenance of such software is problematic, since its documentation rarely reflects the implemented code. In this context Reverse Engineering of Software can help by means of recovering the project information lost or not generated during the development phase and documenting the current software state. The difficulties begin to exist when the systems have problems such as: i) difficulty on understanding the rules of business, ii) problems in the code structuring; and iii) ignorance of the reasons that led to certain decisions. The purpose of this work is to study and analyze the usability of CASE tools to perform reverse engineering software. For this reason, some reverse engineering techniques were researched and studied, as well as automated tools that support these techniques. Moreover, these tools were used in an actual software to guide the analysis.