A reverse engineering process to support software design document generator

Abstract

Reverse engineering provides a better understanding of an existing system by maintenance team, especially when they are facing a large and evolving legacy system. Documentations made manually by developers in some cases are inconsistent. Some change requests, updates, or bugs fixing somehow are not included in the documentation as the software evolves. Developers tend to be focusing on source code rather than the documentation. Consequently, code is the most reliable source to be referred as the system representation. Therefore, generating the documentation directly from the source code makes the result consistent with the code at all times. This study focuses on the process of reverse engineering to extract related information from source code of software. Three steps performed in this research. First, extract information from database to XML. Next step is processing data from XML into database. Finally, Word-like document is arranged from the database. The output of this process will be a software design document (SDD) which is an IEEE standard and should be significant for developer team in analyzing their old systems.