An evaluation of reverse engineering tool capabilities

Reverse engineering tools support software engineers in the process of analyzing and understanding complex software systems dur ing maintenance, reengineering, or rearchitecting. The functionali ty of such tools var ies from editing and browsing capabili ties to the generation of textual and graphical repor ts. There are several commercial reverse engineering tools on the market providing different capabili ties and supporting specific source code languages. We evaluated four reverse engineering tools that analyze C source code: Refine/C, Imagix4D, SNiFF+, and Rigi. We investigated the capabili ties of these tools by applying them to a realwor ld embedded software system as a case study. We identified benefits and shor tcomings of these tools and assessed their applicabili ty for embedded software systems, their usabili ty, and their extensibility. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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