A Framework for Software Re-documentation by Using Reverse Engineering approach

Abstract

During software evolution, programmers spend time and effort in the comprehension of program and that is due to the fact that the documentation is often incomplete, inconsistent and outdated. In order to avoid these problems, software could be re-documented. Software re-documentation enables the understanding of software that aids the support, maintenance and evolution of software. Re-documentation is implemented by different approaches. Reverse Engineering is one of these approaches that provide a better understanding of an existing system by maintainers and developers, especially when faced by a large and evolving legacy system. This study proposes a framework for systems re-documentation based on reverse engineering approach. The re-documentation is done using a reverse engineering tool that generates graphical representations of a system which is then used to produce documentation in a form of a standard document UML notation. Since the quality of the generated documentation is important for program understanding and software evolutions, the study also proposes a model for evaluating the quality of the generated documentation.