An overall process based on fusion to reverse engineer legacy code

The fusion method for object-oriented development of systems is used for reverse engineering of legacy code. A literature survey is presented on relevant techniques available for covering most of the activities involved in conducting reverse engineering. Using these techniques, an overall process, based on the fusion method, called Fusion/RE, is presented. Fusion/RE was used to reverse engineer an existing environment for editing and simulating statecharts. Selected parts of the sample application documentation are included, together with a discussion of the benefits obtained. The main features of Fusion/RE include its extensibility to integrate new heuristics and tools for data reverse engineering and some metrics that allow one to assess the conversion effort.