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Bibliographic References: Terminology
This section describes the terminology used throughout the
bibliography. The terminology was defined by Chikofsky and Cross
[Chikofsky:90a] and Byrne [Byrne:92].
The list is in alphabetical order.
- Design recovery
- is a subset of reverse
engineering in which domain knowledge, external information, and
deduction or fuzzy reasoning are added to the observations of the
subject system to identify meaningful higher level abstractions
beyond those obtained directly by examining the system itself.
Design recovery recreates design abstractions from a combination of
code, existing design documentation (if available), personal
experience, and general knowledge about problem and application
domains.
- Forward engineering
- is the traditional process of moving from
high-level abstractions and logical, implementation-independent
designs to the physical implementation of a system.
- Program understanding
- is a related term to reverse
engineering. Program understanding implies always that understanding
begins with the source code while reverse engineering can start at a
binary and executable form of the system or at high level
descriptions of the design. The science of program understanding
includes the cognitive science of human mental processes in program
understanding. Program understanding can be achieved in an ad hoc
manner and no external representation has to arise. While reverse
engineering is the systematic approach to develop an external
representation of the subject system. Program understanding is
comparable with design recovery cause both of them start at source
code level.
- Reclamation
- is a synonym to reengineering.
- Re-code
- is a change to implementation
characteristics. Language translation and control-flow restructuring
are source code level changes. Other possible changes include
conforming to coding standards, improving source code readability,
renaming program items, etc.
- Re-design
- is a change to design
characteristics. Possible changes include restructuring a design
architecture, altering a systems's data model as incorporated in
data structures, or in a database, improvements to an algorithm, etc.
- Redocumentation
- is the creation or
revision of a semantically equivalent representation within the same
relative abstraction level. The resulting forms of representation
are usually considered alternate views (for example, dataflow, data
structures, and control flow) intended for a human
audience. Redocumentation is the simplest and oldest form of reverse
engineering, and can be considered to be an unintrusive, weak form
of restructuring.
- Reengineering
- (also known as renovation
and reclamation) is the examiniation and alteration of a subject
system to reconstitute it in a new form and the subsequent
implementation of the new form.
- Reformatting
-
is the functionally equivalent transformation
of source code which changes only the structure
to improve readability. Examples are pretty printers.
- Renovation
- a synonym to reengineering.
- Re-specify
- is a change to requirements
characteristics. This type of change can refer to changing only the
form of existing requirements. For example, taking informal
requirements expressed in English and generating a formal
specification expressed in a formal language such as Z. This type of
change can also refer to changing system requirements. Requirement
changes include the addition of new requirements, or the deletion or
alteration of existing requirements.
- Restructuring
- is the transformation from
one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction
level, while preserving the subject's system external behavior
(functionality and semantics).
- Reverse design
- is a synonym to design recovery.
- Reverse engineering
- is the process
of analyzing a subject system to (i) identify the system's
components and their interrelationships and (ii) create
representations of the system in another form or a higher level of
abstraction.
- Reverse specification
- is a kind of
reverse engineering where a specification is abstracted from
the source code or design description. Specification in this context
means an abstract description of
what the software does . In forward engineering, the specification
tells us what the software has to do. But this information is not
included in the source code. Only in rare cases, it can be recovered
from comments
in the source code and from the people involved in the original forward
engineering process.