Abstract

To make an existing program easier to understand and modify, we propose an expectation-driven model for reverse engineering which identifies and extracts two main kinds of components: environment-dependent operations and domain-dependent functionalities. A reference information model gives expectations of components and their interface data. We apply program slicing, firstly proposed by Weiser, to this function recovery problem by modifying the notion of program slice to a direct slice and transform slice. The former, direct slice, is an executable subset of the original program containing all the statements which directly contribute either to the writing on an external sink or to the reading from an external source. The latter, transform slice, is also an executable subset including all the instructions which directly or indirectly contribute to transform an external input into an external output. 1:

Citations