Design Recovery as lntegral Aspect of Software Engineering
Wojtek Kozaczynski, LA Maciaszek · Australian Software Engineering Conference · 1990
Design recovery reconstructs high-level design abstractions from a combination of existing requirements specifications and code and from a body of domain knowledge. On the lifecycle of software development, design recovery is responsible for the bulk of reverse engineering activities, i.e. it is responsible for a smooth transformation from the maintenance phase to the requirements analysis phase. The results of reverse engineering activities can then be applied to develop a new, possibly revised, system or a portion of it in the forward engineering fashion, thus creating a re-engineering cycle. This paper considers design recovery as an integral part of a software engineering environment, in which the forward and reverse engineering tasks cooperate. The proposed software engineering architecture comprises three components: (1) the design repository component, (2) the intelligent design component, and (3) the presentation component. The three components are further classified and described.