PACKRAT: a software reengineering case study

Reengineering is the process of examination, understanding, and alteration of a system with the intent of implementing the system in a new form. Many approaches for design recovery or reverse engineering have been suggested, most with some type of support tool. Since a project's time constraints may prohibit use of sophisticated techniques and/or tools due to the learning curves associated with the techniques and tools, methods that can be applied in lieu of complex support tools may be required. This paper describes a case study project involving the reengineering of a network application used by Texas Instruments to monitor network traffic in a local area network.