Home » Technology » Software Re-engineering » Re-engineering..... a brief discussion

Re-engineering..... a brief discussion

© Faisal Bin Bashir

Software maintenance has, for many years, been regarded only as an unwelcome and resource-wasting activity, which would be eliminated by advances in software development techniques. More recently, however, as the proportion of software activities concerned with maintenance has been recognized as growing relentlessly, from 50 percent in eighties to an estimated 80 percent today, a realization of the centrality of maintenance in the production and continued utility of the software systems has become more widespread. For this 80 percent part we have only 20 percent of the existing tools. So its today's need to develop maintenance tools. The basic technique used in developing the tools for software maintenance is reverse engineering. The over all process is called re-engineering which also includes the restructuring phase. These three techniques together are termed as RE(3).

Formally, re-engineering is the process of traversing the traditional software life cycle, first in the reverse direction to some stage, involves some restructuring at this phase and then going back into the forward direction.

The software life cycle mainly comprise of three stages. These are requirement specification, then design and followed by the implementation of the designed system. Most of the large systems follow this traditional process. There may be other stages in between like design analysis and testing, but the prior mentioned are the three main stages and cover others as well.

During the earlier phases of the software development the computers were expensive. So the programmers tried to program in such a way so as to save the maximum memory. As in those days the memory was expensive and not much memory was available in the computer. One of its examples is that the programmers in those days used to assign only two fields for the date. Another assumption in those days was that the systems were thought to be developed for a period of ten to twelve years. The technology was changing with such a speed that the programmers thought that these programs will be replaced by the new ones in future. So they didn't take care about the proper documentation about the changes which were made after the system started running for the desired purpose.

But, unfortunately, these systems evolved and some of them are still running in large organizations. Even some organizations depend on these systems for their existence. But due to the lack of documentation, the problem for maintenance of these systems has become a big problem with an increasing cost. There is a need to convert these systems into maintainable ones.

The copyright of the article Re-engineering..... a brief discussion in Software Re-engineering is owned by . Permission to republish Re-engineering..... a brief discussion in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.