Human-Centered Reverse Engineering Environments should support Human Reasoning

Today's information technology (IT) under goes dramaticmass changes [McC98] due to ur gent requirements lik e the coming of the ne xt millennium (Year-2000-problem) [Mar97], the European currenc y union [Gro98], and emer ging technologies lik e theWorld Wide Web. Electronic Commer ce is about to become one of the k ey business technologies for the ne xt decade. While ne w company start-ups are able to purchase modern information systems (IS) that meet these ne w requirements, longer established enterprises have to deal with pre-e xisting systems. In man y cases, such legacyIS comprise comple x architectures that have evolved over several generations of programmers and lack a suf ficient technical documentation. Still, they maintain a great amount of v aluable business data and their functionality is often critical for the mission of the enterprise. Consequently , a complete replacement of these systems is virtually impossible or at least implies a significant risk.