During the reverse engineering effort, several problems arise. Many problems concern how to conduct the reconstruction of the design. The most serious problem that may arise is that the design can be heavily biased by the original language implementation.
Collect Information
The first step is to collect information about the program and the system in general. Sources of information consist of program source code, design documents, documents containing an overview of the simulation system architecture, and the programmers experienced with the overall system. In most cases, the reverse engineering efforts are carried by a person who has no exposure to the domain system.
There could be a chance that several items of information may not be found. This missing information could be the data descriptions using the shared memory or things like that. The software models use signals and shared memory to communicate with themselves. Description of the data passed in the shared memory areas, ranges of values and significance may not be documented completely. Therefore, there is a chance that the recovered design, which is needed to document the structure of the shared memory area, cannot document the purpose of most of the data elements. A second type of missing information could be the application domain information. For example, if there is a program for the calculation of taxes of different, you would know that they are calculated based upon some formula or equation. If the application domain information is missing, the recovered design may list the equations found in the code but can not explain their significance. Domain knowledge is needed to provide this information. In the absence of the domain information, the design recovery can not be achieved. So in this case, the design information can be recovered but the design can not be completely documented and explained in terms of the application domain.
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