Reviewing the Recovered Design and Generating its Documentation


Reviewing Recovered Design

At this point the recovered design is reviewed for completeness and accuracy. Reviewing for accuracy means verifying that the recovered design does describe the program; that no functionality of the program has been omitted and that no extraneous information has been recorded. The point to keep in mind is that this effort is to document the recovered design, not the program.

Reviewing for completeness involves determining what information is missing and whether it can be recovered. It is not possible to recover the design completely. The most difficult information to recover is the reason behind a processing step. Other information that is difficult to recover is:

1. If the input system involves some computations based on some formula or equation, then this specific code can't be documented. The significance of these equations is difficult to determine unless the knowledge of the application domain is available.

2. The meaning of the information held by some data items is also difficult to document. The reason is that it's difficult to determine their possible significance.

Document Generation

The final step is to prepare the recovered information and format it into a design document. Information not recovered in earlier steps is collected at this point. This includes an overview of the system, an overview of the program, its intended purpose, its history, related documents, etc. A document generation system can be developed which is used to generate a design document for the recovered design.

The copyright of the article Reviewing the Recovered Design and Generating its Documentation in Software Re-engineering is owned by Faisal Bin Bashir. Permission to republish Reviewing the Recovered Design and Generating its Documentation in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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