Producing software engineering documents through software reverse engineering for node.js web application

Abstract

The easiest way to understand, distinguish and getting to know how, why and what does a software do, is to refer to its documentation. Lack of software documentation, outdated or poor documentation would cause many important factors of a good software, never reach to an ideal level, for instance, the software maintainability index, which would never get a good mark without proper documentation. The case study of this project has been developed initially as a prototype and proof of concept. Normally, in software development life cycle, once the concept is proved to be developable, the final product will be started to design and developed with adequate documentation. Failing to do so, have resulted in problems such as high costs of software maintenance, difficult and time-consuming process of knowledge transfer between developers. This project uses a combination of automated class diagram generation tool with some manual adjustments, alongside with source code analysis and informal interviews, as a software reverse engineering method to retrieve the design concepts and requirement use cases of the software. The outcome of this study would be deliverable in form of two documents, Software Requirements Specification and Software Design Document.