Reverse engineering & design recovery: An evaluation of design recovery techniques

Software maintenance and reuse has become an important business goal in recent years. Reverse engineering provides a way to achieve this goal by extracting useful information. This extracted information serves as basis to provide understanding for maintenance and reuse software system. Design recovery is a phase of reverse engineering that deals with extraction of design artifacts from high level abstraction. A large number of techniques are available in literature. In this paper we have conducted a survey (from start of reverse engineering era 1989 to the date 2010) of those techniques and evaluated them on the basis of an evaluation criterion. Paper describes the complete comparison of these techniques based on defined parameters mentioned in evaluation criterion.