Reverse Engineering of System Interfaces A Report from the Field

This paper is a report on three real industrial projects conducted to redocument the system interfaces of existing application systems - trading system, a health insurance system and a bank credit system. The first reverse engineering project was for the purpose of accessing the backend C server software from Web clients. The second project was for the purpose of testing the interfaces between COBOL subsystems running parallel in two interconnected environments - computer and a Bull mainframe. The third project was to extract procedures from existing PL/I programs for reuse as Web services. The lessons learned from the three projects are assessed to draw conclusions on how to improve the development process