Reverse engineering in a reuse context

This report presents the results of a survey on existing reverse engineering techniques and how they can be applied in the context of software product lines. Software product lines are seldom developed from scratch. In industrial practices they rather emerge based on a set of existing similar systems. This offers product line architects the chance to reuse existing assets, but it is usually unclear whether or not the assets are adequate for the product line. Section 2 motivates reverse engineering in reuse context. Reverse engineering offers a variety of methods and techniques to analyze existing assets and enable a better understanding of assets to-be-reused and their context, and thus, to mitigate reuse risks. An overview on the state-of-the-art in reverse engineering is presented in Section 3. However, architects often lack an overview about reverse engineering techniques, how to apply them and how to take advantage from the results. The current state-of-the-practice is discussed in Section 4. This survey tackles this problem by addressing the following questions: Which reverse engineering technique could be applied in a reuse context? What are typical problems in industry? What are future challenges for reverse engineering in a reuse context? The survey poses questions that will be addressed in the course of the ArQuE. The challenges with respect to reverse engineering are discussed in Section 5.