Abstract :
The past decade (1987-97) has assisted a growing interest in reverse engineering and the consequent proliferation of papers and experience reports about this subject from both academic and industrial environments. Many types of reverse engineering process components (i.e. methods, algorithms, techniques, procedures, processes model, etc.) have been proposed. To be able to reuse effectively the published results, we need to characterize the process components, understand the similitude and differentiate them, and choose the ones to be used either alternatively or together in the same process. The Characterizing Reverse Engineering Process component methodology (CREP) is a systematic and defined approach to compare either processes or process components. It provides the definition of a characterizing evaluation schema specialized for the reverse engineering. The first phase of the CREP method formalises the process components, and constructs the process models; while, the second phase characterizes the process components, highlighting their most peculiar concepts and grouping the homogenous information
