From Code to Design: A Reverse Engineering Approach

Understanding existing pieces of software is a challenge faced by many software developers regardless of their experience. This project researches into existing reverse engineering tools used for code comprehension and identifies the limitations of the current approaches. Furthermore, a prototype implementation was developed to extract design models from available source code in order to achieve better program comprehension. The design and implementation of the model extraction tool were defined, with a focus on Java systems and an agile methodology. This tool was realised by extending the existing open source diagrammatic software, UMLet, with a set of features to aid in code comprehension. Finally, the prototype implementation was evaluated against the related tools in the field as well as by a group of professional experts.