Article,
The canonical activities of reverse engineering
Annals of Software Engineering, 9 (1): 249--271 (May 2000)
Abstract
Abstract This paper describes three categories of canonical activities that are characteristic of reverse engineering for program understanding.The activities are data gathering, knowledge management, and information exploration. All tasks carried out by a softwareengineer during a program understanding exercise can be mapped to a composition of one or more of these canonical activities.The design space formed by the canonical activities can be used to classify the capabilities provided by individual supportmechanisms using a common vocabulary. A descriptive model that categorizes important support mechanism features based on ahierarchy of attributes is used to structure the canonical activities.
