Session - 6

Reverse Engineering

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Software Maintenance
• Software is released to end-users, and
• within days, bug reports filter back to the software
engineering organization.
• within weeks, one class of users indicates that the
software must be changed so that it can
accommodate the special needs of their
environment.
• within months, another corporate group who
wanted nothing to do with the software when it was
released, now recognizes that it may provide them
with unexpected benefit. They’ll need a few
enhancements to make it work in their world.
• All of this work is software maintenance

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Maintainable Software
• Maintainable software exhibits effective modularity
• It makes use of design patterns that allow ease of understanding.
• It has been constructed using well-defined coding standards and
conventions, leading to source code that is self-documenting and
understandable.
• It has undergone a variety of quality assurance techniques that
have uncovered potential maintenance problems before the
software is released.
• It has been created by software engineers who recognize that they
may not be around when changes must be made.
• Therefore, the design and implementation of the software must
“assist” the person who is making the change

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Software Supportability
• “the capability of supporting a software system over its whole
product life.
• This implies satisfying any necessary needs or requirements, but
also the provision of equipment, support infrastructure, additional
software, facilities, manpower, or any other resource required to
maintain the software operational and capable of satisfying its
function.” [SSO08]
• The software should contain facilities to assist support personnel
when a defect is encountered in the operational environment (and
make no mistake, defects will be encountered).
• Support personnel should have access to a database that
contains records of all defects that have already been
encountered—their characteristics, cause, and cure.

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Reengineering

Business
processes

IT Software
systems Reengineering applications

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Business Process Reengineering
• Business definition. Business goals are identified within the context of four
key drivers: cost reduction, time reduction, quality improvement, and personnel
development and empowerment.
• Process identification. Processes that are critical to achieving the goals
defined in the business definition are identified.
• Process evaluation. The existing process is thoroughly analyzed and
measured.
• Process specification and design. Based on information obtained during the
first three BPR activities, use-cases are prepared for each process that is to be
redesigned.
• Prototyping. A redesigned business process must be prototyped before it is
fully integrated into the business.
• Refinement and instantiation. Based on feedback from the prototype, the
business process is refined and then instantiated within a business system.

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Business Process Reengineering

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BPR Principles
• Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
• Have those who use the output of the process perform the
process.
• Incorporate information processing work into the real work
that produces the raw information.
• Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they
were centralized.
• Link parallel activities instead of integrated their results.
When different
• Put the decision point where the work is performed, and
build control into the process.
• Capture data once, at its source.
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Software Reengineering

Forward inventory
engineering analysis

Data document
restructuring restructuring

code reverse
restructuring engineering

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Inventory Analysis
• build a table that contains all applications
• establish a list of criteria, e.g.,
• name of the application
• year it was originally created
• number of substantive changes made to it
• total effort applied to make these changes
• date of last substantive change
• effort applied to make the last change
• system(s) in which it resides
• applications to which it interfaces, ...
• analyze and prioritize to select candidates for reengineering

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 Document Restructuring
• Weak documentation is the trademark of many legacy systems.
• But what do we do about it? What are our options?
• Options …
• Creating documentation is far too time consuming. If the
system works, we’ll live with what we have. In some cases,
this is the correct approach.
• Documentation must be updated, but we have limited
resources. We’ll use a “document when touched” approach.
It may not be necessary to fully redocument an application.
• The system is business critical and must be fully
redocumented. Even in this case, an intelligent approach is
to pare documentation to an essential minimum.

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Reverse Engineering
dirty source code

restructure
code

clean source code processing

extract
abstractions interface

initial specification database

refine
&
simplify

final specification

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Code Restructuring
• Source code is analyzed using a restructuring tool.
• Poorly design code segments are redesigned
• Violations of structured programming constructs are
noted and code is then restructured (this can be done
automatically)
• The resultant restructured code is reviewed and
tested to ensure that no anomalies have been
introduced
• Internal code documentation is updated.

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Data Restructuring
• Unlike code restructuring, which occurs at a relatively low level of
abstraction, data structuring is a full-scale reengineering activity
• In most cases, data restructuring begins with a reverse engineering
activity.
• Current data architecture is dissected and necessary data models
are defined (Chapter 9).
• Data objects and attributes are identified, and existing data
structures are reviewed for quality.
• When data structure is weak (e.g., flat files are currently
implemented, when a relational approach would greatly simplify
processing), the data are reengineered.
• Because data architecture has a strong influence on program
architecture and the algorithms that populate it, changes to the data will
invariably result in either architectural or code-level changes.

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Forward Engineering
1. The cost to maintain one line of source code may be 20 to 40 times the
cost of initial development of that line.
2. Redesign of the software architecture (program and/or data structure),
using modern design concepts, can greatly facilitate future maintenance.
3. Because a prototype of the software already exists, development
productivity should be much higher than average.
4. The user now has experience with the software. Therefore, new
requirements and the direction of change can be ascertained with greater
ease.
5. CASE tools for reengineering will automate some parts of the job.
6. A complete software configuration (documents, programs and data)
will exist upon completion of preventive maintenance.

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Economics of Reengineering-I
• A cost/benefit analysis model for reengineering has
been proposed by Sneed. Nine parameters are
defined:
• P1 = current annual maintenance cost for an application.
• P2 = current annual operation cost for an application.
• P3 = current annual business value of an application.
• P4 = predicted annual maintenance cost after reengineering.
• P5 = predicted annual operations cost after reengineering.
• P6 = predicted annual business value after reengineering.
• P7 = estimated reengineering costs.
• P8 = estimated reengineering calendar time.
• P9 = reengineering risk factor (P9 = 1.0 is nominal).
• L = expected life of the system.

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Economics of Reengineering-II
• The cost associated with continuing maintenance of a candidate
application (i.e., reengineering is not performed) can be defined as
Cmaint = [P3 - (P1 + P2)] x L

• The costs associated with reengineering are defined using the following
relationship:
Creeng = [P6 - (P4 + P5) x (L - P8) - (P7 x P9)] `

• Using the costs presented in equations above, the overall benefit of

End of Session -6

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Questions:
1. Need of Reengineering.
2. What are BPR Principles.
3. Purpose of Inventory Analysis.
4. How Forward Engineering work.
5. Advantage of Code Restructuring.

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