REVERSE ENGINEERING FOR SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Abstract Reverse engineering covers a wide range of software life cycle activities starting with the existing implementation, recovering, or recreating the design and deciphering the requirements implemented in the system. The objective of this article is to present a state of the art on Reverse Engineering techniques used in the context of software maintenance. For this purpose, a Systematic Literature Review was carried out, in which 47 primary studies from 4 databases, published in this century, were analyzed. Research questions were raised regarding the distribution of publications throughout this century and, about the type of maintenance on which they focus; Likewise, the techniques and metrics reported for reverse engineering processes in maintenance activities were analyzed. A significant increase (just over 200 %) could be observed in the second decade of this century compared to the first. On the other hand, it was observed that perfective maintenance is the one in which the most techniques were identified, although the majority are static. From the analysis of the selected studies, a total of 22 types of reengineering techniques used for software maintenance/evolution tasks were identified, reporting a set of eight types of metrics used to evaluate the quality of reengineering processes in the evolution of the software.