Programmanalyse - interaktives Reverse Engineering

In order to administrate program systems better, to adapt applications to new business proccesses or to new technical conditions there is a need of "understanding" these applications and the components of program systems belonging to them. "Understanding" means here a crative process which should be the base of reengineering. Tools are neccessary to support this proccess of "understanding". Desirable are tools which allow an integrated recording, evaluating and, when the occasion arises, a further proccessing of information which is neccessary for an "understanding". It is important to proccess not only information contained in the program system and its components but information from the enviroment of its applications as well. It is appropriate to compress this information to get useful abstract representations. Better system understanding is achieved through interactive and goal-oriented experiments with the aid of an intuitive and graphical presentation. Methods an strategies for t he "understanding" of program systems and applications which are described in the repart we developed to prove them in a project of IBM.